


Innocence|Violence

by HappyJian



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Backstory, Blood and Violence, Character Death, Child Abuse, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Out of Character, Rape/Non-con Elements, Slow Burn, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, Swearing, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-10-29 09:33:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 67,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10851243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappyJian/pseuds/HappyJian
Summary: Set in an alternate canon universe, where the story’s events are altered significantly but canon spoilers still remain.Nilfeim leads an aggressive invasion of Lucis, and only the Crown City of Insomnia remains. When innocent Prompto and his friends are caught in the countryside of Lucis, unable to return home, his nightmares he’s repressed his whole life gain strength and threaten to tear him apart. Only a violent hunter, Aura, can help him cope with the dark realities of his past. But can he truly love another person if he is unable to love himself?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story based _loosely_ on Final Fantasy XV's main storyline. Some of the structure is still left intact, as are many of the hunts, locations, and characters, but much of the story has been changed. Spoilers are abundant.
> 
> I'm not going to lie, I was a nervous wreck posting this story. I haven't posted a fanfiction online in ten years. This was half-experimental, half-fun, to see if I have what it takes to one day publish my own original work. Here's hoping. 
> 
> Enjoy!

_In the hot shadows, lit only by the green light of an outside source, a blonde girl pressed her fingers to Prompto’s trembling lips. She pressed one finger to hers, beads of perspiration lining her top lip. Blood ran in one thin line from her nose._

_He blinked back tears, running one sticky wrist across his eyes, and nodded._

_Quietly, she pressed open hands against the grate leading out from the air ducts. She eased her head out and stared down the corridor, waiting for movement. A shadow shifted down the greenlit corridor, and she jerked the grate closed and scooted back with Prompto into the darkness. They held their breath and waited, knobby knees between knees, hands pressed into each other’s tightly. The Deathless in the corridor shuffled past the duct, and continued down to the open doors at the far end. Its shuffles died out the further it walked. Eventually, the noise ceased entirely._

_The girl scooted back to the grate, and once again poked her head through. The corridor lay empty. She pushed the grate open the rest of the way, then motioned for Prompto. Quivering, he shook his head. She reached toward him and grabbed his hand, and he reluctantly climbed out into the green light. Holding his hand, she took off at a run. She was smaller than him and perhaps more nimble, and he struggled to keep her pace. But she never strayed from his side even though she could run faster without him. They reached the end of the corridor and veered right. Down this corridor, and down another corridor, faster and faster. Several more quick turns in a seemingly endless maze._

_The main elevator out of the laboratory levels lay ahead like a metal spindle gyrating in open air. Several Deathless patrolled the circular platform, lit by the luminescence of the red emergency lights flashing above them. She rushed past one, skidded into the elevator, and slammed the back of her wrist against the control panel. Prompto tumbled in behind her. The Deathless moaned, and the doors slid closed. The elevator descended. She sat down on the floor, tears wracking her into a terrible fit, and Prompto dropped beside her. He put one hand on her knee, and that’s all she needed. She grabbed his hand and pinched it tight into her small fist. She choked, the tears falling down her face in streams._

_They rode the elevator to the ground floor, and when the door shuffled open, they found themselves hesitant to continue. They crawled out and examined the level. Only an empty railed walkway leading out. The girl grabbed his hand again and yanked him up, pulling him down the walkway. The smell of rain lingered earthy in the air. A window lay open somewhere. It spurred Prompto to run faster, and soon he was pulling her down the walkway, through a series of storage rooms and dormitories. Another right turn, and a door sat precariously open at the far end of the maintenance room. Rain drizzled through the light of a streetlamp onto oil-slicked pavement ahead. They burst through the doorway into open air, buzzing with adrenaline. And Prompto felt the rain for the first time, against his face, snaking cool lines through his hair…_

“Ignis, put the top up, will ya’?”

“Preferably before the Prince melts.”

The rain pattered across Prompto Argentum’s cheeks and stirred him into waking. He blinked, and a raindrop hit him in the corner of his eye. The black top of the Regalia rolled forward and clicked above him, shielding him from the slow, Duscae rain. He stretched, looking out the window at the passing treeline.

He dreamed of it again. It had been at least three months since he last dreamed of it. He didn’t like remembering, and he didn’t like the lingering ache it left him with when he opened his eyes. He willed the memory to go away before the ache showed itself on his face.

“Sleeping Beauty’s finally up.”

This part he grew accustomed to. He plastered on a grin and pulled himself up and stared between the front seats to the two passengers in the back. “Which one of you kissed me awake?”

“Pretty sure Specs up there,” the Prince, and his best friend, Noctis Lucis Caelum, said with a smirk. 

“I think it was his Ebony breath that dazzled you.” Beside him, his shield, Gladiolus Amicitia, glanced over the top of his book.

“One does what one has to.” The driver, and the Prince’s mentor, Ignis Scientia, waved his hand casually.

The three most important people in the world to him. He did everything he could each day to ensure their happiness when he could barely hold onto his own.

“You talked a lot, Prom,” Noctis continued.

Prompto’s breathing hitched a hair, but he kept his smile from dropping. “What did I say?”

“Something about a warm bed in Lestallum, if I heard correctly.” 

“We really ought to finish this hunt and collect our earnings first, Noct.” Ignis glanced in the rearview mirror at Noct. “Even then, we need the gil to replenish our curatives before we settle into a hotel.”

A groan from the back seat. “Camping sucks.”

“Big baby,” Gladio mumbled.

Another groan. “And with all this rain?”

“There’s no guarantee it will be raining in Hammerhead,” Ignis continued. “The rain may clear up by the time we arrive. If you adamantly oppose of camping, the caravan is at least substantially cheaper than Lestallum.”

Noctis grunted. “How much longer?”

“Two hours. We’ll be in just before dusk.”

Prompto folded his arms across himself and returned to staring out the window. The ache welled up inside him, and he fought it tooth and nail before it surged itself in front of the others. A break in the trees, and he could see several Voretooths running as a pack into the sparse trees further back from the road. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass, pulling himself together.

“I’m huuuungry,” he groaned.

An unopened, dry pack of Cup Noodles crashed down on his lap from behind him.

“Aw, seriously, dude?” He pitched it back over his head at Gladio.

“Quit your whining then.”

“I could go for a bite to eat,” Noctis added.

“Well, we’re all just going to have to wait until we’re in Hammerhead,” Ignis said, his eyes trained ahead. “Like I said, if we don’t turn this hunt in, we won’t get paid. And you’ve already disagreed with camping.”

“Fine, I’ll wait,” Noctis grumbled.

“Not me,” Prompto said. “Anything edible back there that doesn’t involve cooking?”

“You could pick the dried carrots out of the noodles,” Gladio offered.

He frowned, then settled back against the window and closed his eyes. “Well, I guess I’ll just starve. Waste away. To nothingness.”

“Wouldn’t hurt. You could certainly use to lose a few, tubby.” 

“Who’re you calling tubby?” he said. “I’m not tubby!”

Gladio reached around the seat and pinched the side of his cheek. “It’s the baby fat right here.”

He swatted Gladio’s hand away.

“If you fall asleep, no talking this time,” Noctis said.

“If I fall asleep, no eavesdropping this time,” he said, gripping his arm tight under his gloved hand. If he could go to sleep, the ache would not return. He would dream another dream and forget all about it. But the rain could not lull him back into sleep’s realm. He hated the rain and the smell accompanying it. The Regalia’s company quieted as Gladio returned to his book, Noctis fell asleep himself, and Ignis turned on the radio to a slow, melodic tune.

The Regalia drove through the next two hours in near silence. Prompto watched the world pass by through the window, taking the occasional snapshot of the scenery and his comrades. They crossed into Leide and its dusty terrain, and though the clouds did not clear, the rain had stopped as Ignis predicted. The trees disappeared gradually, as did the grass. Stony faces and sweeping, sandy flatness replaced the green. The sun began its descent behind blackened clouds and the rocky horizon when the glow of Hammerhead appeared.

“Finally!” Prompto exclaimed, straightening in the passenger seat. “At long last, the lights of civilization!”

“Everyone knows why you’re so excited to be here,” Gladio said.

He frowned. “Ah, no, you don’t.”

“Ah, yeah, we do.”

“Think she’ll be waiting for you when we arrive?” Ignis said underneath a smile.

“Come on, now,” he said, giddy, then swallowed hard. “Well, you think, maybe…?”

“Prompto, why are you being so loud?” Noctis mumbled from his sleep.

“We have arrived, Noct, so maybe you ought to think about waking,” Ignis said. He pulled into the Hammerhead service station and up to the single gas pump. The moment the ignition shut off, Prompto rolled out of the car as quick as he could. Noctis slowly crawled out of the backseat and shut the door behind him, blinking heavily.

“Let us settle this job before we decide our next step,” Ignis said, indicating Takka’s diner.

“Fine by me,” Noctis said. He pushed his black hair from his reddened eyes and headed that direction, leaving Gladio to unpack the large paper parcels of meat from the trunk.

“Imma go check to see if Cid finished those weapons we left,” Prompto said with a jerk of his thumb to the garage.

Gladio furrowed his brows as he closed the trunk. “Cid said he would call us.”

Prompto shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t get around to it yet.”

“All right. Let Cindy know I said hi,” he replied, winking.

“Dude, could you not?”

He waved his hand. “I’ll see you at the diner in a few.” Then he proceeded to follow Noctis and Ignis across the parking lot, packages under each arm.

Prompto trotted toward the open garage door on the other side of the convenience store and peered inside. A small light at a table near the back illuminated a curvy figure as she bent over into the hood of an old pickup truck. Prompto casually made his way up to her.

“Hey, Cindy!” he said cheerfully.

Cindy Aurum’s dirtied face poked up over the edge of the hood, goggles secured around her eyes and blonde tresses. When she saw Prompto, she grinned and lowered her goggles to her neck with one greasy hand.

“Well, hey there,” she greeted. “Does you being here mean the Prince is here, too?”

“Yeah, we just got back from this, like, really super dangerous hunt,” he said, stretching his arms and subtly flexing while he did.

“You guys make it all right?”

“Yeah, just a Catoblepas. No biggie.”

“Well, that’s good. How’s the old girl?”

Cindy never ceased to ask how the Regalia fared, even if their trip only took them to Galdin Quay.

“Doing great. As always.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment, yet Cindy didn’t seem to notice. “Especially from the last work you put into it.”

“That’s just superb to hear! Hey, next time you want to soup her up, I’ve got just the thing that’ll help on her fuel efficiency. You holler at me when you want me to do it, alright?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“All right! I’m gonna get back to work. Let the Prince know I said hi.” And with that, Cindy pulled her goggles back up and ducked into the truck’s hood again. The clicking of a socket wrench told him to leave.

“I’ll see you around,” he said, taking several steps back.

“Uh-huh,” she said, her voice echoing in the metal hull.

He suppressed a sigh and left through the garage door, trying to steal another glance back but seeing she was too busy to notice. He walked the remainder of the way to Takka’s diner, where he could see the other three inside at the counter, talking to the restaurant owner. 

The four of them had worked continuously on hunts for Takka Bureidamu for the past several weeks. Prompto didn’t mind the work, and certainly didn’t mind the gil, knowing full well they were genuinely helping out the citizens in the area who could not fend off the beasts themselves. Plus, the extra work provided a nice distraction from their primary assignment at hand. When they departed the Crown City of Insomnia, they were instructed to collect the Royal Arms for Noctis before setting out on a goodwill mission to the various cities throughout Eos. King Regis did not explain why, nor did Cor Leonis, the Marshal of the Lucian Crownsguard. As such, his friend Noctis neglected to care about dealing with the matter. Apparently eliminating pesky animals and the occasional daemon was a far more lucrative task.

Prompto stepped over the threshold into the diner. The cool air conditioning pushed back into his face, fluttering his hair, and he instantly felt the tiredness in his limbs. The hunts they grabbed were increasingly becoming more difficult, and it took everything for Prompto to not pass out after they felled each one.

“You’d do good to hire us full-time,” Gladio said as he patted the paper parcels of Catoblepas steaks on the counter. “This is hard work.”

“Hopefully this supply will last you a good while,” Ignis said as Takka dropped the hunt’s payment on the counter in front of him.

Prompto walked up to the counter, beaming a cheesy grin despite his fatigue. “Bet we’re the best hunters you’re working with.”

“Eh, well, not quite the best, but I do appreciate the help, boys.” Takka pulled the steak parcels off the counter and dropped them on a hand truck beside him in several loads.

“Aw, man. I was really proud of us, too,” Prompto said, crossing his arms.

“We’ve all had formal training. Some of us longer than others.” Gladio seemed peeved. “You can’t tell me regular hunters are better than us.”

“Not hunters,” Takka replied. “Just hunter.”

“Wait…you’re saying you have one hunter who’s better than a whole group of four?” Noctis asked.

Takka nervously chuckled. “Now, I’m not saying you aren’t good help. Really. But you don’t have the speed like this hunter has.”

“This guy I gotta meet,” Gladio mumbled.

Takka opened his mouth to answer, but took notice out the window and instead nodded over Prompto’s shoulder. “Well, here’s your opportunity.”

The four turned to see through the dusty window a pickup truck pulling in the shadows between two parking lot lights. Dusk neared full night, and the remaining tangerine light left a warm glow over Hammerhead. The driver side door opened, and a silhouette exited. They walked around to the back of their pickup and pulled out from the bed a large backpack and a satchel of what could have been hides. They slung the pack over their shoulder and walked toward the diner. When the hunter stepped into the glow of one of the parking lot lights, Prompto’s mouth went dry.

The hunter was a young woman.

A wild tantrum of dark hair lay in spindles around her sharp shoulders. She was hard bodied and tanned, freshly sun-reddened on the peaks of her shoulders and cheekbones. She stepped through the open doorway and approached the counter, her eyes falling on the group of guys nearby. She gave them a small smile before she dropped several unrecognizable animal hides on the floor between two stools.

Prompto couldn’t keep his eyes from wandering. Leather hide pants and boots, and a white tanktop. An assemblage of dog tags, sharp teeth, feathers, cords, and chains hung from her neck inside her shirt. Freckles dotted her face underneath a dusting of dirt. On both hands, she wore black leather gloves, and on one, a wide aluminum wristlet adorned with turquoise.

“Dave’s dog isn’t by his camper, so I imagine he isn’t here,” she said to Takka. Her voice was a lot softer than Prompto expected from someone so rough looking.

“No, he’s out for the night. Should be back mid-afternoon tomorrow.”

“Well, if you see him before I do, let him know I didn’t find those tags, but I did find someone else’s.” She tugged on a bloodstained dog tag around her neck, but didn’t remove it. “And I’ll be renting the caravan tonight.”

“Pardon us, miss,” Ignis said, stepping forward. “Hate to be a bearer of bad news, but the caravan has already been rented for the evening.”

She cut her eyes to the four of them—to Ignis specifically. “Oh. Okay.” And then said nothing more.

If Gladio had wanted to meet the hunter from before, he withdrew his desire and said nothing to her now.

Noctis shifted his feet. “You have anywhere else you could stay?”

“Uh, yeah. There’s a couple campsites around.” She pulled up her backpack onto a nearby stool and wrestled around in its contents.

Prompto swallowed back his dry mouth. “But it’s getting dark soon. Will you make it before the daemons come out?”

She paused her wrestling, glanced up at the four of them, and settled her eyes on Prompto. His heart skipped a beat. Her eyes glittered the most intense storm gray he had ever seen. “Why are you worried about me?” she asked, inclining one eyebrow so slightly.

Takka jumped in suddenly. “Oh, don’t mind them. They’re just being courteous. Were you planning on eating before turning in?”

She paused a moment longer, staring at Prompto with such a strange concentration he felt his limbs jelly beneath him. Then she dropped her gaze back to her bag and fished out a smaller satchel clinking with coins. “Yeah. Hot sandwich and coffee.”

Takka came around the counter for the hides and brought them into the back room. She plopped down on the stool to the left of her bag.

“Take a photo, Prom. It’ll last longer,” Gladio muttered over the top of his shoulder. Prompto brushed him off and turned back to the others. 

“Can we eat something without vegetables tonight?” Noctis suggested, already heading toward the door.

“I’m not having this discussion with you again,” Ignis said. He grabbed up Takka’s payment from the countertop.

A hard hand grabbed Prompto’s shoulder and directed him toward the door. “You too, loverboy,” Gladio chuckled.

Prompto gave a weak laugh before glancing over Gladio’s arm to the girl sitting at the counter. She looked tired, her face resting in her hands with her elbows propped on the counter’s dirty surface. He felt guilty taking the caravan from her, and she was alone.

“Hey, guys,” Prompto called out once they were outside of the diner.

Ignis and Noctis stopped up ahead.

“Why don’t we let her stay in the caravan for the night?”

“We’ve already paid,” Noctis said, crossing his arms. “Unless you want to go camping again.”

“N-no, I meant…the caravan sleeps six. We could let her stay with us.”

Noctis wrinkled his eyebrows. “Uh, I’m…not so sure.”

“It’s all very chivalrous, Prompto,” Ignis said with a sigh, “but she is a stranger, and I’m sure she would not feel very comfortable sharing such a small space with four men.”

“Look, she’s a hunter, and she’s clearly very tired. And it’s almost dark out. She just got back from a hunt like we did. She could have the bed in the back.”

“You mean my spot?” Gladio asked.

“It’s only a night. I just feel bad for her.”

Noctis smirked. “You think Cindy would approve?”

Prompto felt his face grow hot. “What? No! Wait, I mean…what does Cindy have to do with it?”

“So you’re okay with Cindy knowing you spent the night in the caravan with another girl?”

His face grew even hotter. “I’m just trying to be nice.” He swallowed. “Besides, if we can keep someone from having to go out into the darkness with all those daemons…”

“All right, all right.” Noctis put his hands up in the air. “I’ll ask her.”

“Are you quite sure, Noct?” Ignis asked.

“I’ll go with you,” Prompto said, falling into line behind Noctis.

“Chivalrous, indeed,” Gladio snorted as he bumped Prompto’s shoulder with his elbow, throwing him off balance. He headed to the caravan. “But I’m still getting the big bed. I can’t fit on those rinky-dink bunks.”

Prompto ignored him and tailed after Noctis, who already stepped inside the diner and headed towards the girl at the counter. She sipped on a cup of coffee as Takka sizzled the meat for her sandwich on the grill. She acknowledged Noctis as he approached her, then caught sight of Prompto behind his shoulder. By the time Prompto walked up to the conversation, Noctis had already asked, and her eyebrow had already climbed up her forehead.

“But, you guys don’t even know me. That’s awfully generous for a stranger.”

“We just got back from hunting a Catoblepas, so yeah, we know what it’s like to be tired after a hunt. And no one likes camping.”

She smirked. “Camping’s not so bad.”

“I-I don’t know. Being out there with those daemons, man…” Prompto laughed, but felt his laugh crackle in his throat when she looked at him again.

“Daemons aren’t so bad either,” she said, putting her coffee down and turning in her seat to face them. “They’re just like anything else you’d need to kill.”

“You’re not afraid of the daemons?” he asked.

“Are you saying you are?”

He shrugged. “Oh, well, I dunno…they just…”

She chuckled. “The sigils on the campsites protect you from them. So if it’s nature that bothers you about camping, you guys aren’t going to make very good hunters.”

“We just prefer to sleep in something more comfortable after a hard hunt,” Noctis said. “With that in mind, that’s why we wanted to offer you one of the beds.”

She lifted the coffee to her lips again, thinking for a moment, then gave a small nod. “All right. That sounds very nice. Thank you.”

The nerves bundled in Prompto’s gut told him he was either overjoyed or nervous, and he couldn’t decide which one.

“Great!” Prompto said. She detected the tone of his voice immediately. He tried to subdue his excitement. “I tried to get the bed in the back for you, but the big guy needs it worse.”

“Oh, it’s no problem. The bunks work well enough for me. I’ll be over in a little bit after I’ve eaten.” Then she turned back around in her seat and didn’t say another word.

Noctis led Prompto back out of the diner to a waiting Ignis leaning against the doorframe of the caravan.

“She said yes, dude!” Prompto said, feeling giddier than usual, and he wasn’t sure why.

“You seem too excited,” Noctis said, clapping the back of Prompto’s shoulder. “Now how are you going to break it off with your Grease Monkey Goddess?”

“There’s enough of me to go around. I’m not stingy.”

“Wonderful news, I’m sure,” Ignis replied. “Mind your manners, in the meantime.”

“Aye-aye,” he replied as he plopped down in a patio seat and pulled out his phone.

The sun had now completely set behind black mountains. While he waited, agitatedly opening and closing every app on his phone, and trying several times to play King’s Knight with the others to no avail, Gladio discussed the possibility of additional hunts in the area while Ignis prepared a supper of chicken and rice at Noctis’ request. Noctis himself dozed upright in the chair across from Prompto. When dinner was served, Prompto ate his meal in a rush, burning his tongue. He complimented Ignis, though he barely tasted it. 

As soon as Noctis finished with his meal, he deposited his plate in the sink and headed for the back room. Gladio stated he felt achier than usual, and called it a night as well. Ignis gathered the remaining dishes and cleaned the kitchenette as Prompto remained outside.

As much as he tried to find distraction in his phone, he found himself glancing up every so often through the diner window at the girl at the counter. She ate in silence, though it seemed like Takka tried to strike up conversation with her several times. Maybe she really was as tired as she looked. He refilled her coffee again, and she sipped at it quietly. When her dinner was finished, and she gathered her bag from the stool beside her, Prompto immediately dropped his gaze down to his phone and pretended to be busy. On his screen, however, was nothing more than a notification for a phone update. He read through the terms and agreement as he saw out of the corner of his eye the girl approach him with her bag slung over a shoulder.

“Hey, there,” she said. Prompto glanced up. Her eyes were reddened and lined, several blinks away from dead asleep. Guilt spread through him as he remembered she had every intention of going out to find a campsite.

“Hey. Sorry, didn’t see you there,” he said, smiling. He closed his phone and stood up, feeling shakiness through his legs. Cindy made him giddy, but this girl made him nervous. She was almost intimidating.

“I don’t want to mess up your bromance, so I’ll probably just crash wherever you’ll have me,” she said with a shrug.

“You’re not messing up anything. Two of them are already asleep.” He thought a moment. “Um, can you handle snoring?”

“I’m a pretty light sleeper.”

“That makes two of us, so that leaves the back room out. Gladio and Noct together will bring the roof down. You and I can just bunk up together.”

She cleared her throat uncomfortably.

“Oh, wow, no, not like that!” he said, waving his hands to alleviate his mistake. The last thing he wanted was for this girl to think he thought along those lines. “No, I meant, you and I can just take the bunks. Separately. Separate bunks. Not together.”

She only nodded.

“But, uh, in the meantime, you play any games?”

“Games?” She narrowed her gaze.

“Yeah, like card games, or King’s Knight, or anything?”

Her throat made a small noise. “I don’t mean to be rude to your hospitality, but I really am tired.”

“Oh! Yeah, sure! Sorry, I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly.” He pocketed his phone and led her inside.

Ignis had already stacked away the dishes and was wiping his hands on a dishtowel when the two of them ascended into the front room. Ignis saw Prompto, saw the girl, and then politely nodded to her.

“Pleasure to meet you, miss. My name is Ignis Scientia. And you are?” He extended a hand out.

She pleasantly took and shook it. “Aura Creperum. Thank you for allowing me to stay the night, Ignis.”

Prompto completely neglected to even ask her name. His cheeks enflamed at the sound of it. “Sorry, I forgot introductions. I’m Prompto. Uh, Prompto Argentum.”

She reached out her hand to shake his as well, which he was unaccustomed to. He took it, feeling the warmth of her fingers in his and their firm hold on him, and immediately his blood rushed through him.

“Nice to meet you, too, Prompto,” she said, smiling, though it failed to reach her eyes.

“Any decision where you would prefer to sleep, Aura?” Ignis asked.

“One of the hall bunks is fine with me.”

“Ditto,” Prompto added. “I’ll set us up, Iggy.”

“You probably know the layout of the caravan if you’ve rented it before,” Ignis continued, ignoring Prompto, “but should you need anything, the rest of us will be sleeping in the back room. Don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Of course,” she said.

With that, Ignis nodded and left through the sliding door at the end of the hall, closing it behind him. Prompto leaned down toward the caravan door and pulled it closed. “Top or bottom?”

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Oh, the bunks! Sorry, I should have…clarified.”

“Oh. Eh. Whichever.”

“In that case, I call top. I like it the best.”

“Being on top?” she asked.

“Yeah! Wait, what?” He glanced at her, only to see a sly smirk pull at the corner of her mouth. _Fuck._ “Y-you know what I mean.”

She walked through the curtained area, just before the back room, and dropped her bag on the bottom bunk. She then returned to the front area and pulled down the shade overtop the kitchenette counter. “Could you lock the door please?”

“Oh! Yeah, sure.” He complied, then pulled down the door’s shade to mimic her actions. He started to feel a little worried as she proceeded to close every curtain. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just don’t like renting the caravan if I can help it.”

“You afraid of something?”

She shrugged. “Aren’t we all?”

“Nope. Not me. I’m pretty much fearless.”

“I thought earlier you said you were afraid of the daemons.” She pulled off her boots and socks and dropped them on the floor underneath her bunk.

“That’s daemons. Entirely different story. Everyone should be afraid of them.”

“And you’re a hunter?” she asked, humming.

“Okay, you’re splitting hairs with what I said.” He crossed his arms. “Maybe not fearless. I’m pretty brave. I just don’t like heights. Or bugs. And I’m claustrophobic. Occasionally the dark is a little intimidating, but I think that goes hand in hand with daemons.”

“Yeah, I’d say you’re pretty fearless all right.”

“I’ve seen a lot to be afraid of. Just the other day, Noctis—he’s the black-haired one who offered you the room…”

“I know who the Crown Prince of Lucis is.”

“Oh.” Sometimes Prompto forgot just how recognizable his best friend’s face really was. “Of course. Right, so anyway, the other day, Noctis suggested a trek through the Daurell Caverns. If you haven’t been…” And suddenly, his voice trailed off without him realizing it. Aura, without hindrance, proceeded to untie her hide slacks and slide them off her hips to the floor. Black underwear and nothing else to cover her. She really was hard-bodied, with very little fat and sleek toned muscles along her thighs and sculpted pelvis. Her ass was perkier than her pants made him believe. Fire spread across his nose and cheeks, and he turned abruptly to face away, clearing his throat. “Uh, but, if you’ve never been, I would say not to bother. Too many daemons and poisonous run-offs to be safe. I mean, just the Hecteyes are enough to creep you out. What are they even looking at? And the lake down there is just plain freaky with nightmarish fish. What’s a lake doing down there anyway? And filled with all these fish you don’t want to eat?” He rambled and he knew it.

“Did I embarrass you?” she asked in a soft voice from behind him.

 _Yes._ “Nah, just giving you your privacy.” He pulled off his own boots.

“It’s okay to say I did.”

“I-I just thought it was rude to stare.” He could barely believe he said that aloud.

She gave a light laugh. “You’re cute.”

Cautiously, he glanced over his shoulder. She slid the wool cover to the foot of her bed and pulled back the sheet, then sat herself at the edge of the mattress. She let out a sigh before propping her elbows on her knees and dropping her face into her hands.

“So, is everything all right?” he asked, low.

She didn’t immediately answer. After a minute, she slowly nodded and dropped her hands. “Yes. I’m fine.”

He wasn’t convinced. “Can I get you anything?”

“Some darkness would be nice.”

“Sure.” He swallowed, then turned the kitchen light off. All that remained was the hallway light in front of the bunks. He dropped his boots near the front door, then pulled his shirt off over his head and hung it on a hook next to the bathroom.

“Nice,” she said under her breath. 

He knew, from the heat in his ears, he had to be blushing. He glanced down at her, but she didn’t meet his gaze. She still wore all her necklaces and even her bracelet, though her gloves had long been shed.

“Thank you once again for the bed.”

He tried to smile, but couldn’t. “You’re welcome.”

She crawled under her sheet and turned over to face the wall. The sheet barely clung to her curves. She wiggled her arms underneath the pillow, her hair a dark waterfall across the ivory of the sheet. He tried not to let his eyes wander or linger, and he forced himself to look away. He snapped off the light hanging over the bunks, shielding them in near darkness save for the weak glow from the lampposts outside cracking through the blinds and curtains. He climbed the ladder and plopped down on the tiny mattress. Despite the stiffness, his limbs and muscles were so sore he could not care less. He didn’t bother with a cover, given the heat of the night. 

After only a moment, he could hear Aura’s rhythmic breathing, and knew she was asleep. Assisting her, even if only for one night, warmed him. And though he felt like he didn’t deserve it, he was glad for the peek at her body she willingly gave him. He smiled a cheeky smile before allowing himself to succumb to his dreams once again. Only this time, there were no nightmares, and there was no ache.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far, thank you!


	2. Chapter 2

When the sun rose and cut him in the eyes through the kitchenette window, Prompto forgot where he was for a second. His head buzzed from the sheer brilliance. He turned his head away before remembering he wasn’t alone. He rubbed at his eyes and slowly peered over the edge of his bunk. To his overwhelming disappointment, the girl Aura was already gone, the bed remade for the next person to use it. Her bag and boots were missing, too. He sighed and dropped back down on the mattress, throwing his arm over his eyes. For a moment, he wanted to pretend to be normal and develop a normal relationship, but in the blink of an eye, she had vanished. He considered going back to sleep, but thought against it, and hopped off the bunk. He pulled his shirt back on and flicked aside the blinds on the front door. Aura’s truck was also gone. All hope of seeing her for breakfast diminished as well.

Unsure if anyone else was awake, he quickly ran a toothbrush through his mouth at the kitchen sink and fingered out the flat parts of his hair his pillow had matted down. His camera at the edge of the kitchen counter slid into his back pocket. He pulled his boots back on and hopped out the door onto the pavement. As he closed it behind him, Gladio rounded the corner of the caravan from the direction of the road, shirtless and sweating from his daily morning run. The peaks of his cheeks were flustered.

“Morning?” Gladio said in an accusative tone. 

“Back at ya,” he mumbled back, scanning the parking lot.

“No, I’m asking you. You know it’s morning, right?”

“Man, I’m awake, aren’t I?”

“But…nevermind.” He opened the caravan door and went back inside.

Prompto didn’t know why he woke so early. He already saw Aura’s truck was gone. Perhaps he slept better last night than he thought. He drank a breath of fresh air and walked to the diner to grab a drink before the others rose.

Inside, Takka fried eggs and Catoblepas sausage patties across his grill for two customers at one end of the counter. Prompto dropped himself into the seat in which Aura sat the previous night. He waited for Takka to finish the order before he waved him over.

“Morning, Takka,” he said with a feigned yawn. “Can I get an orange juice, please?”

“Sure thing. Your friends joining you?”

“Eh, they’ll be around.” As Takka turned to fill a glass for him, Prompto prepared himself for the real reason he came into the diner. “Hey, who was that girl who was here last night? The hunter you said was better than us?”

Takka smirked. “Who, Aura? Well, she’s been a hunter for the better part of five years for most of Lucis.”

“Why is she the best?” He dropped several paper gil into Takka’s open palm.

“Because she’s quick. Damn quick. You give her a hunt, you can expect her within the day delivering good news. In fact, we had a Bandersnatch in our own Weaverwilds for years, feeding on Dualhorns and making snacks out of locals and wanderers, and she comes in one day, notices we have a problem, and took it out a couple hours later. Hiked back on foot carrying the monster’s damn jaw. Alone.”

Prompto knew she intimidated him, but didn’t realize how intimidating she really was. 

“Oh, now, don’t let that scare you about her,” Takka continued, taking in Prompto’s expression. “She’s a good girl. A little withdrawn, but her violence is reserved for the beasts.”

He nodded slowly, clenching his untouched orange juice. “You maybe know where she went?”

Takka’s eyes darkened. “Why?”

A defensive wall jumped up between them, and Prompto couldn’t figure out why he felt nervous. “No reason. I was just curious. She stayed with us last night, but wasn’t with us when I woke up.”

“You’re not looking for her, are you?”

“What?”

But he shook his head. “I don’t know. She comes and goes as she pleases. Probably had another hunt to turn in elsewhere. Or out looking for Dave.” Then he dropped the conversation altogether. “Let me know if you boys want to pick up any additional hunts and I’ll set you up. I need to finish these customer’s orders.”

“All right.” Prompto slowly sipped at his juice, eyeing the dusty landscape outside the diner. He remembered the Weaverwilds, directly behind the diner where he could not see, and remembered encountering the exact Bandersnatch months before when the Regalia broke down the first time. The group of them were far too intimidated to initiate anything with the monster at the time. Yet when they returned much later, it was gone. The girl Aura had done that.

The more he dwelled on Aura, the more irritated Prompto became. Gladio often described Prompto as a skirt-chaser, teasing him about Cindy and nudging his shoulder when any girl passed by them. He never saw himself as that, but perhaps, in this instance, Gladio was right. He was pursuing, albeit not actively, Cindy. This girl was simply another missed connection Prompto believed he wanted.

_But she called your body nice._

_She also called you cute._

Two words a guy did not want to hear. Nice and cute. Like a baby chocobo.

She wasn’t overly friendly. She criticized his fears and then purposefully embarrassed him by flaunting her body with no intention of going beyond that point. She hadn’t even wanted to talk or play a game first before she went to bed. She had no interest in him, or anyone in the caravan. Even Noctis. And she didn’t want to be bothered. So much so, even Takka was ready to shut Prompto down when he began asking questions. So, as foolish as he felt, Prompto reluctantly dropped her from his mind.

He finished off the rest of his orange juice and headed back outside as the sun slid out from behind the mountains completely. Ignis piled a grocery sack and a duffel bag into the trunk of the Regalia. Prompto pulled his camera out of his pocket and snapped a photo of a sleepy-eyed Noctis leaning against the doorframe of the caravan while Gladio rustled around inside.

“Not now,” Noctis mumbled, peering through one open eye.

“Then when?”

“Not ever.”

“Not gonna happen, dude.”

Gladio dropped out of the caravan with a duffel bag in one hand, swinging the door shut behind him with the other. “You ready?”

Noctis grunted.

“So what’s the plan now?” Prompto asked, pocketing his camera again.

“The plan is for Noct to decide,” Ignis said as he meandered up to them from the Regalia. “We have several options. You have another two and a half weeks before the conference in Tenebrae, so in the meantime, we can continue hunting in the area. We also still have two other known locations for Royal Arms.”

“It all seems like busy work,” Noctis said.

“If you would rather political work, you do have several speeches you need to memorize in your upcoming appearances.”

“Which of the Royal Arms is the closest?”

Ignis exhaled slow through his nostrils before adjusting his glasses. “Balouve Mines, just south of here.”

“I remember that place. I don’t like it.”

“Would you rather another hunt then?”

“I don’t think anyone would _rather_ hard work for the sake of hard work,” Noctis said, “but we do need more supplies, and I know the Regalia could use the extra gil.”

“Oh yeah, that reminds me,” Prompto interrupted. “Cindy said last night she has something she’d like to try on the Regalia to spruce up the fuel efficiency.”

Gladio flashed his teeth at him in an off smile. “So how are those weapons coming along?”

“What weapons?” he asked.

“In that case, what we can do is leave the Regalia here for Cindy to work on,” Ignis suggested, “and venture forth on one of the local hunts to pay for it. That will keep us in the area until you are ready to return to Balouve.”

Noctis turned the corners of his lips down, staring off into space as he often did when he slipped back into the safety of his head, then shrugged. “All right. Let’s go talk to Takka and see what’s available.”

“Woo-hoo!” Prompto said with an exaggerated pump of his fist. “Just like real heroes in a real RPG. Let’s go kill something!”

“Way too early to be acting like that,” Noctis said as he reluctantly trooped toward the diner with Ignis in tow. Gladiolus and Prompto hung back, leaning against the Regalia as they waited.

“So what happened to the hunter from last night?” Gladio asked. “She ever show up?”

Prompto’s heart fluttered before he forced it to settle down. “Yeah, eventually.”

“What happened this morning?”

“I don’t know, man. She was gone before I woke up.”

“She was gone before I woke up,” he scoffed. “You didn’t run her off, did you?”

“If I did, it was completely by accident.”

“What did you do?”

“What? Nothing!” Prompto could hear his own voice rising. “She said she was very tired, and then went straight to bed.”

“All the curtains and blinds were closed like someone was hiding.”

“Or or or…maybe, she’s a _she_ , and _she_ didn’t want anyone peeping in on her while _she_ slept in her skivvies.”

A slow smile crept across Gladio’s face. “Wait, what? You saw her underwear?”

Prompto’s face grew hot. Again. “N-not intentionally. She just…didn’t have any modesty, is all.”

Gladio’s fist came up, bumping against Prompto’s. “Nice one, Prom.”

He hummed, agreeing, but not internally. The more he thought on it, the more he believed she had mocked him when she slid her pants down.

“So. She look good?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. She did.”

“Better than Cindy?”

“Man, why you all pitting them against each other? They’re two totally different girls. Don’t make me choose.”

“You can’t have both.”

Prompto scowled. “Not trying.”

“But then again, at the rate you’re going, you won’t have either.”

He crossed his arms, closing himself up to the conversation. “Okay, big guy, we’re done here.”

With a throaty chuckle, Gladio crossed his arms, mimicking Prompto, and waited. Several minutes passed, and several cars pulled in and pulled out of the service station, before Noctis and Ignis finally left from the diner and crossed the lot to the Regalia.

“What took so long? Couldn’t decide?” Gladio asked.

Noctis shook his head. “I didn’t have it in me to return to the sewers back toward Insomnia. Even though it was the most profitable one.”

Ignis straightened his shoulders back. “I tried to convince him eliminating a Jormungand would take care of the Regalia in full with plenty to spare, but he had already decided against it.”

“So where are we going?” Gladio asked.

Noctis hesitated, before gesturing toward Ignis.

“We’re taking on a Behemoth,” Ignis answered for him. “In Keycatrich.”

“What? Ah, come on, man!” Prompto groaned, dropping his arms. “We just defeated a Catoblepas _yesterday_. Couldn’t you find something small, and easy, and less likely to kill us?”

“Unfortunately, we’ve already eliminated the smaller hunts at this point,” Ignis said. “He only had three left.”

Weariness immediately began its serpentine path through Prompto’s aching muscles, and he now regretted rising earlier than usual. “Then why couldn’t you pick the third option? Surely it’s better than a giant snake or a giant dogbearlion, right?”

“We couldn’t take it because it had already been taken.”

Prompto’s heart skipped a beat. “W-who took it?”

“We didn’t ask.”

A muscled arm wrapped around Prompto’s head and squeezed. “Oh, loverboy only wants to know because his new eye candy left early this morning without telling him where she went.”

“Cut it out, dude,” he said with a slap at Gladio’s head behind his.

“Oh, that’s right,” Noctis said. “I completely missed her. She make it in?”

“You could say that,” Gladio added, laughing.

“Seriously, I said, quit it!” Prompto pulled hard from his grasp, straining his neck when he did so. He rubbed a hot hand on the muscle beneath his ear once freed.

Noctis raised an eyebrow at Prompto. “Did something happen last night?”

“Got her down to her underwear,” Gladio said.

“No!” Prompto snapped. “Nothing happened.”

“With that tone, I would say something happened,” Noctis continued.

“Who’s ready to go?” Prompto said quickly, hopping up and walking around to the other side of the Regalia. “Let’s beat the heat and take care of this.”

“Uh, we’re leaving the Regalia, remember?” Noctis said.

Prompto cursed under his breath before shutting the now open door. “Nevermind! Okay. You drive it over there to get serviced, I’ll get a head start walking.”

“Whoa,” Noctis said, taking a step back. “You mean you’re passing up the chance to go talk to Cindy? Who are you and where’s Prompto?”

He was passing the point of playful frustration into full-blown frustration. “No. I’m not passing up chances. I’m just waiting for the right moment.” And then he took off walking to the edge of the parking lot without waiting for anyone else to lead him.

“Prompto, don’t go off by yourself!” Noctis yelled after him.

“I got him, guys,” Gladio said.

Prompto half-slid, half-skipped down the small sandy incline leading up to the edge of the pavement beside the caravan. He landed on an overly rocky terrain, then walked in the direction Keycatrich, despite having been there only one time. Behind him, Gladio’s boots scuffled against the rocks. Though he remained close behind, Gladio said nothing to slow Prompto down or even try to catch up with him.

Prompto didn’t prefer it that way though. Usually he went to great lengths to fill the empty air with noise. He was never one for the appreciation of silence. He wished he hadn’t walked out in front. He wished someone would catch up with him and change the subject to something other than Cindy or the hunter from last night. Maybe he just wanted to get the hunt done and over with so they could move on. Then he considered, if they finished the hunt quickly, and were able to return to Hammerhead in time to rest well tonight, maybe he could see the hunter again. She had to return to talk to Dave this afternoon. Then Prompto would talk to her properly without fatigue wearing on either one of them. And if she didn’t show up, he would make every attempt to hang out with Cindy outside of the garage. Talk about something other than the Regalia. These thoughts lightened his mood, and even quickened his pace.

Even at a hurried pace, it took approximately two hours to reach the northern edge of Leide. At Keycatrich, the Behemoth put up a decent fight for the four of them. He was sturdier than Deadeye had been, but perhaps not so aggressive. It took every bit of their remaining strength to bring it down.

During the fight, Prompto had felt his limbs give way underneath him twice. The fight proved difficult and exhausting. Twice, Noctis ordered Prompto to use a potion on himself. He hated wasting them, as he somehow fell in battle more than the rest and therefore consumed more, but Noctis called the shots. And twice, he had pulled a potion from his pocket and popped the glass in his hand. The potions cooled him from the inside out, covering his skin in fluorescent blue before evaporating into the scalding atmosphere.

Prompto did what he could, firing his Rebellion’s bullets into weakened zones, and even nailing one of the Behemoth’s eyes, but he was knocked aside with the swipe of the beast’s claw. He quickly bruised along the left side of his rib cage, dizzied underneath the weight of the blow. Before he could pop a third potion, the Behemoth thudded to the ground, panting and drawing in its last breaths. Prompto left the killing blow for Noctis as he dematerialized his gun. Noctis shot one final warp strike underneath the monster’s jawline, and a guttural growl later, the Behemoth exhaled and was no more. Prompto couldn’t have been more relieved.

After already spending almost three hours taking the monster down, Gladio spent another hour skinning its hide and cutting away steaming tenderloins from its flank. The sun approached early afternoon by the time they began the two hour trek back to Hammerhead. And Prompto could feel every minute of the fight scouring his bones. His muscles were tight and raw, and his hands were enflamed from the Circular Saw vibrating in his grip. They all carried large satchels of Behemoth steaks on their backs, knowing what they left behind would be consumed by the Coeurls prowling in the area. The added weight, which he guessed to be about forty pounds worth, made his body hurt even more.

They finally arrived back at Hammerhead, and the sleek Regalia in its glittering glory sat parked off to the side out of the garage. Prompto’s heart thudded once when he thought about Cindy. He considered, after his failed attempt to gain her attention the night before, going over and checking in with her. Even invite her over to have a drink with them at the caravan. He dropped the meat satchel from his back and handed it to Gladio. Then to keep himself from wimping out, he squared his shoulders and headed to the open garage.

“Ask about the weapons this time, while you’re at it!” Gladio yelled from behind him before his voice shifted into a rumbling laugh.

Prompto’s footsteps echoed across the pavement as he passed by a dozing Cid Sophiar in his lawn chair, snoring nasally. The open garage door beckoned him in with the noise of a spray gun. As he expected, Cindy sat on her haunches, hunkered down in front of a detached bumper on a brace, spraying pearly white over a blemished silver base.

“Hey, Cindy,” he said. He meant for his voice to come out confident, but his muscles hurt so much, it came out more desolate than he wanted.

“Hey, you,” she said, all smiles.

_She doesn’t even know your name._

“What are you working on there?” he asked. Some light talk about work might lead to more interesting conversations.

“Just some colorin’ for another customer. Whatcha up to?” Flecks of white dotted her nose and cheeks, and his heart blushed at the sight.

“Oh, you know, same shit, different day. Another hunt.”

“Huh. I never really got into all that,” she said, adjusting the tip on her spray gun. “Papaw always said, there’s something more rewardin’ in creatin’ things rather than destroyin’ them. Certainly couldn’t do it every day.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s tough, but it’s work,” he said with a shrug. “You do what you have to.”

“I suppose so,” she said, returning to her work. A thinner coat of white spread evenly across the coat already in place. “Have you taken a look at that beauty out there?”

_She means the Regalia._

“No, haven’t had the chance. Thought I would come over first and…” He hesitated to say what he wanted to say next. He took a deep breath. “…I-I wanted to invite you to maybe have a drink with us. At the caravan.”

“Aw, well, that seems like a swell idea,” she said, beaming, “on a different day.”

His heart dropped.

She motioned to the bumper in front of her, then to the shelled car sitting inside the garage. “I need to finish this customer’s paint job. He’s expectin’ to pick it up bright and early tomorrow. Sorry, sugar.” She flashed one of her pouty frowns at him.

“Oh, hey, it’s no biggie! Another time, when we drop back through, yeah?” He waved it off, hoping for nonchalance.

She gave a reassuring smile. “Of course! Next time you come to visit.” She then jabbed a finger past him toward the Regalia. “And take a look at her. Amped up her fuel efficiency, like I said I would. She’ll need a new polish soon, but I’ll get around to that only when you all have the chance.”

He couldn’t suppress the sigh. “Yeah. Of course. I’ll…let Noct know.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she said.

“I guess, I’ll just leave you to it then.”

She nodded, and then turned her full attention back to the bumper in front of her, spraying in one smooth stroke across the length of the panel.

He turned and shuffled out the garage door, not bothering to look back over his shoulder, not bothering to even glance at the Regalia she cherished more than him. Cid still dozed noisily in his chair. At least he had an excuse to not ask about the weapons.

Inside the diner, the other three finished up the payment with Takka. He didn’t bother going in. Instead, he turned back to the convenience store and waltzed inside. He took his time wandering around, grabbing up a bag a chips, two strips of Dualhorn jerky, and a blue-colored energy drink. He indicated a cheap fifth of vodka sitting behind the cashier at the counter, as well. He dropped the gil into the cashier’s hand and marched back out and headed to the caravan. They were staying the night and he didn’t care if the others wanted to protest. The items fell from his arm onto the patio table, and his butt fell into a patio seat. He unscrewed the top of the vodka and quickly chugged an ounce before he second-guessed himself, then followed up with the energy drink.

Noctis was the first one out of the diner, and as he approached Prompto, his walk slowed and his eyebrows raised.

“Bit early, don’t you think?” Noctis asked when he nodded at the vodka on the table.

Prompto wanted to say something about loneliness, but he shrugged instead and plastered on one of his rehearsed smiles. “Hey, we just killed a Behemoth. A Behemoth! Woo-hoo, let’s celebrate!” He lifted the bottle and wobbled it in front of Noctis’ face.

“If Ignis catches so much as a whiff of that stuff on my breath—”

“What is he going to do?” he said, goading him on. “You’re the freaking Crown Prince, man! Live a little!”

Noctis shuffled his feet, looking lazily into space.

“Come on. A _Behemoth_.”

“Okay, yeah, I’m in.” Noctis dropped into the seat beside Prompto and grabbed the vodka out of his friend’s hand. Prompto’s rehearsed grin became genuine when Noctis gagged on the alcohol’s burn.

“Good, right?”

“No! Damn. Did you get the cheapest stuff in there?” He grabbed the energy drink and tried to drown the taste.

Prompto took another ounce from the vodka. “Hey, not everyone is royalty, you know. Us plebs have to count every gil.”

“Now I know I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing, am I?” Gladio’s thunderous voice could be heard across the length of the parking lot as he exited the diner, heading toward them. Ignis followed close behind.

“It depends. What did you see?” Prompto said, ducking the fifth under the table.

“Gimme that.” Gladio swiped for the vodka, brought it into the light, sighed, and dropped back into Prompto’s hand. “Weakling.”

“Hardly. Go get your own,” he protested.

“Noct, you really think this wise?” Ignis said as he crossed his arms. “What did you have planned for tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” Noctis said as he grabbed the vodka from Prompto. “Why don’t we take a day?”

“And do what with it?”

“We could go to Galdin Quay. Fish or something.”

“Or you could memorize those speeches. Before you’re in Tenebrae to give one of them. Or before Altissia to give another.”

“Or…we just take a day.”

“Two big hunts two days in a row. I’m in,” Gladio said. “Iggy?”

Ignis exhaled loudly. “The sun isn’t even close to going down yet.”

“Will be in an hour,” Prompto said, sipping at the vodka and chasing it with the blue-raspberry something or another.

“In that case, I need more than just that little thing.” Gladio headed to the convenience store alone.

“Fine,” Ignis said, sitting in the seat across from Prompto. “Maybe one drink.”

But it wasn’t just one drink. With their combined gil, they were able to consume two entire fifths of vodka and three six packs of some really low brow beer brewed in Lestallum. Ignis himself was reddened across the peaks of his cheeks, his glasses sitting on the table in front of him while he babysat his last beer of the evening in his hands. Gladio, who could drink the most of all of them, became ten times louder than normal, chuckling at every little quip the others had for him. Noctis was a little more vocal, abandoning the alone time in his head for time with the others. But Prompto…Prompto quieted down. For being the laughter of the party while sober, he kept mostly to himself, dwelling on memories he didn’t intend to dwell on the more he drank. As the evening wore on, and the sun finally set beyond the hills and mountains, lighting the sky on fire and then extinguishing it into violet starriness, the world swam a little more. Prompto could barely tell up from down. He pulled out his phone, unsure of who he wanted to call, flipped through the names on his contact list, and frowned. There was nobody. He could barely see the button to exit from that screen.

The more he drank, the more lonely he felt. He glanced at the open garage across the parking lot, imagined he could see the edge of the car Cindy worked on inside. Whatever he was missing to be able to snag her attention, or any girl’s attention, he attributed it to the familiar ache inside his hollowed chest. The ache he felt every night before sleeping, every morning after waking. During long drives, and laughter, and meals, and conversation, and battle. He ached for a companion—something his best friends could not give him.

It was as he pulled the second vodka bottle to his lips and began to tip it, he noticed movement out on the road beyond the Hammerhead lights. He blinked hard, thinking he was too drunk to see clearly, until something moved out into the glow of the streetlamps lining the parking lot. It was a figure, shuffling toward Hammerhead.

He dropped the bottle to the table and backhanded Noctis. “Heyguyslook,” he slurred as one word.

Noctis stopped laughing and looked, as did the others.

“Who in Eos…?” Gladio mumbled.

They watched as the figure moved into the light, and Prompto’s heart stopped.

It was the hunter from last night.

Aura.

“Is that…?” Noctis began. He didn’t get to finish.

“Did she just come out of the darkness?” Gladio asked.

Prompto scraped his seat back and stood, stumbling over his own feet. He walked toward her to see her better. From twenty feet away, she appeared dazed, her head dropped low to her chest, her gloved hands hanging limply at her sides. Her backpack was nowhere in sight. 

“Aura? You okay?” he said as calmly as he could through his inebriation.

She shuffled several more steps before stopping. Her hair covered most of her face and the front of her chest, hiding her from his sight.

“Aura?” He moved closer to her, reaching out a hand. “Hey. Remember me?”

She lifted her head, the chains and dog tags around her neck clinking an eerie melody. Her hair moved, and his heart stopped a second time when she bore straight into his eyes.

She was covered in blood.

“Hey, cutie,” she whispered. Then she exhaled and dropped forward onto the pavement, limp.

“Oh, Gods!” he exclaimed, dropping immediately to her side. In no time, the others had rushed over beside him. Ignis helped to roll her over, and Prompto pushed her dark hair from her eyes. Her skin was damp and washed of color. Blood speckled her face overtop her freckles—unlike the white paint on Cindy’s cheeks. The sight made his stomach churn. A dark stripe of blood ran from her jawline down her neck to between her breasts, spreading through her tank top. Both arms were stained brown.

“Is that…her blood?” Noctis asked, but it was already answered for him. Ignis pulled at her tanktop, shredded at his fingers down the center of the bloody stripe. In her flesh, a gaping cut split her open from neck to stomach.

_Fuck, no._

A nauseating cold flooded through Prompto. The familiar ache ripped through his chest. His hands shook as he checked for her pulse under her jaw. It was weak underneath his fingertips.

Noctis was up and running for the diner, and Gladio ran for the convenience store, hollering for help. 

“Do we have a Phoenix Down?” Prompto slurred out loud.

Ignis wrestled around in his coat pockets. “No. Noct has them. But…even if we did have one...”

“We’ll give her one when Noct gets back.”

“This wound is…look, the chances of her surviving…”

“Let’s just wait for Noct.” A crackle in his throat closed it up.

“Prompto…,” Ignis began. 

But Prompto shook his hand at Ignis. He didn’t want for him to say anything more. He reached for the hunter Aura’s hand, still gloved, with her turquoise wristlet, and squeezed it tight in his. Something about the interaction felt painful. The ache he longed to go away pulled at him, down into the darkness he tried to wake from each night. The leather glove was chapped and worn in some places, and cold and wet in others.

More rustles of boots closed in. The hunter Dave Auburnbrie, followed by Takka. Dave nearly shoved Prompto out of the way, and before Ignis could mention a word of consideration or offer any help, he was silenced. Instead, Dave scooped Aura up into his arms and pressed her against his chest. Her head rolled back over his arm, throwing her hair into a warm breeze.

“I’ve got her,” Dave mumbled, and then he carried her to the small camper of his stationed between the diner and convenience store.

“I-is she going to be okay?” Prompto asked in a cracking voice.

If Dave heard him, he chose to ignore him. Takka opened the camper door for Dave and the hunter carried Aura inside. His dog worried his expression and watched the door, his tail limp between his legs.

Prompto couldn’t say anything. The realities of what they experienced every day, with every fight, every hunt they willingly took on, dawned on him in that moment. He had seen her last night. She seemed so sure of herself. Takka said she was the best around, but it didn’t keep her invincible. And he and his closest friends faced it daily, and would continue until at some point, one of them would fall to a misjudgment. To bad timing. To some beast, some man, some event, somewhere. Dizziness, having nothing to do with alcohol, swam through him. He felt mortal. He felt alone.

He dropped his gaze, feeling the swell of drunken tears underneath his eyelids. On the pavement below him, near a glistening bloodstain, sat one of her dog tags on its chain. He stooped to pick it up and pulled it into the light. And his heart sank when he read the name.

It was hers.

_Aura Creperum._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of now, there is a visible end, but its far, far away. Like, through a telescope. I have a feeling this will be a long project if you're up for it.


	3. Chapter 3

Lestallum was ugly. And busy. A run-down duplicate of the slums of the great Insomnia with trash heaps in the streets and drunken plant workers parading through food stalls in the heat of the night. Some aspects of it Prompto found pleasurable. Other aspects, he disliked entirely.

As the four of them walked through its streets, clearing their head of the ongoing political assignments swallowed up by Noctis’ senseless hunts, Prompto snapped his camera away at little things that caught his eye. A vendor’s tray of sizzling kebabs. Two young women engaged in chatter. The angle of the power plant sharply pointing into the velvety starless black. A scrappy dog ran by, and he caught it mid-sprint before it ducked into someone’s open door. He intended in every way to document their journey for Noctis and Lady Lunafreya for their upcoming nuptials following the collection of the Royal Arms, but internally, Prompto used it as his own means for escape. To focus on someone else for a change, and build their happiness, was the best escape in the world. And he could use any escape given to him. 

Nearly two weeks had passed since their incident in Hammerhead, and it was Prompto who suggested leaving the one-stop service station and tackle the smaller hunts in Lestallum for awhile. It didn’t mean he liked hunting. He merely preferred taking on Spiracorns and Arbas before any more Behemoths.

Hanging from his neck, the hunter Aura’s dog tag sat pressed against his bare chest underneath his black shirt. He wasn’t certain why he kept it, or why he didn’t give it to Dave the moment he picked it up. She had to have family somewhere out there, missing her and wondering what happened to her. They would want any memento of hers they could find. To her, he was a stranger. No one who deserved to hold on to her dog tag.

Prompto had wanted to continue waiting in Hammerhead to follow up on Aura’s condition, and would have continued if Dave had not chased him off. He hung around the service station alone the following day, while the others spent it in Galdin Quay, waiting outside Dave’s camper for any update. Dave gave him none, and eyed him darkly each time Prompto asked. His reaction mimicked Takka’s. They didn’t understand why he wanted to know about Aura so badly. When he pissed off Dave to the point of cursing and angry voices, Prompto felt it time to leave, much to his own anguish. He didn’t even bother wishing Cindy farewell.

In some way, he didn’t want to know if Aura survived or not. He was nearly convinced she hadn’t, as Dave brought no food nor drink into his camper to nurse her. In a small regard, not knowing was okay. Leaving Hammerhead kept her alive in his memories, and keeping her dog tag—and wearing it—made him remember the importance of each day. It helped him to hold better consideration for his fellow friends, to be happier and forgiving of them. 

And even more, for reasons he didn’t quite understand, her dog tag staved off the nightmares and the ache that accompanied them.

“The women here are built,” Gladio murmured as he cocked an eyebrow at a passing woman with muscles to rival his.

“Your kind of place then?” Noctis asked. “Or is there such a thing as, ‘too built’?”

“I like ‘em rough, but these gals…” He trailed off, scratching the scruff on his chin.

“It’s intimidating to think a woman can snap you in half,” Noctis said.

“Just step into their shoes and imagine how most women feel every day,” Ignis said, smirking, “when most men could do the same to them.”

Noctis made a noise to say something, but digressed to favor staring off into space instead.

“All this food is making me hungry,” Prompto said as he pocketed his camera. “Let’s eat something. In the next few seconds.”

“Preferably in that time frame,” Noctis said.

Gladio opened his mouth.

“And not Cup Noodles,” he quickly added.

Gladio closed his mouth.

“Surgate’s is always available, unless you would rather one of these counters in the open,” Ignis suggested.

“Rice and curry!” Prompto shouted, and without waiting for the others, jumped ahead and took off toward the open air restaurant, Surgate’s Beanmine. He plopped himself into one of the open seats at an available table and waited. Surprisingly, the restaurant seemed rather busy. They had several additional waiters working tonight and at least six more tables added with mismatched chairs.

“You have your Tenebrae speech memorized, yes, Noct?” Ignis said as he sat beside Prompto.

“Mm-hm,” Noct mumbled with a shrug of his shoulders as he took a chair himself.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Neither.”

“You have three days before you are to meet Lady Lunafreya in Tenebrae for this conference. Your disregard for this political conflict is concerning, to say the least.”

“You sound like my father.”

“And just like him, I only want to see you succeed.”

“Mm-hm.”

A nearby waiter nodded and indicated he would be with the group in a moment. Prompto’s stomach rumbled as he propped his chin against his fist. He felt the dog tag shift against his skin, and he reached up and grabbed it through his shirt, rubbing his thumb along the flat surface.

“We want this conference to go as peaceful as possible. A Crown City invasion is still a very real threat.”

“Ignis, I got it. Okay?”

Ignis sighed before picking up a menu. “Very well.”

“Can’t say these Imperial soldiers patrolling the roads are peaceful looking, though,” Gladio added. “If the Crown City was taken over, they would be all over us in moments.”

“For now, they are not acting illegally,” Ignis answered. “But, I do agree.”

“How is any of this legal?” Gladio growled low. “It’s shady as fuck. And Tenebrae is under the same condition. If they fall, we fall, and vice versa.”

“The Seershand has their work cut out for them if things go awry in Tenebrae,” Ignis said.

“As does the Crownsguard, apparently,” Noctis added with bitter undertone.

“That wouldn’t be an issue if we simply gathered the Royal Arms and looked over the reports I gave you months ago.” Ignis cleared his throat and set down his menu. “But I suppose culling pests is certainly more adventurous, and therefore, more important.”

At that moment, half-listening to the chit-chat between his comrades, Prompto saw a shift of darkness weave through a crowd across the street. He stopped rubbing his thumb on the dog tag. The darkness came from the sweep of a young woman’s hair draped over her shoulders. 

“If I’m going to one day step into my father’s shoes,” Noctis said, dropping his menu without opening it, “I would like to know how the people of Lucis live first.”

“Though admirable a task, I think we’ve taken this a few weeks too far, Noct.”

The young woman in the crowd turned, and Prompto glimpsed her profile underneath a passing light. And the world suddenly slowed.

_It couldn’t be._

Prompto jumped from his seat and took several long strides toward the girl near the edge of the crowd. She didn’t see him. She turned and trotted down the stairs toward the main street lined with vehicles. He picked up his pace, aware of Noctis calling his name behind him. The girl tucked in between two people, even high-fived a small boy playing with his comrades. His heart thumped. Without running, he found it difficult to keep up with her. She ducked into an alleyway in the direction of the weapon shop. He followed. Foot traffic through the alleys was sparse, and he struggled not to call attention to himself. She took another turn, and another, and he remained behind her. And then another turn, and he lost sight of her completely. 

He stopped and spun around in a tight circle. He stood at a junction of sorts, where the lights flickered a little poorer than in other areas. She could have gone down any of four different paths. Without knowing why, he grabbed the dog tag through his shirt again, and immediately chose a direction, climbing a small collection of steps upward. The alley was tighter and darker than the others had been. Yet he heard nothing save for his own footsteps, forcing him to believe he chose wrong. He passed underneath an overhead light when the bulb cracked, shrouding him in darkness.

Then, someone pummeled him into the nearby wall. His head knocked against the bricks, expelling him of all air in his lungs. A sharp object was pressed against his throat.

“Why are you following me?” the girl growled.

He couldn’t see her face. Her head was tucked underneath his vision, his chin pointing sky high under the point of a blade in her fist.

But he wanted to know. He had to know. He slowly reached for the dog tag in his shirt and pulled it out, dropping it against the fabric of his shirt.

“I-is this you?” he whispered.

He felt the girl’s fingers trace the center of his shirt and pull the dog tag up. She held it for a long time before she yanked it from his neck. The chain gave way and broke. Then she dropped the blade from his throat and backed away.

“This is mine. Why do you have this?”

_That’s not possible._

He dropped his chin and tried to look at her. The shadows were thick in the alley with no light, but he could see, from the angles of her shoulders and jawline, and the wild tantrum of dark hair sitting across her shoulders, that it was her.

“I said, why do you have this?” she asked, louder.

“Aura?”

“How do you know me?”

His heart thudded so hard, he believed it would burst through his bone. “You’re…you’re alive!”

She shifted her face slightly to the side.

He swallowed the hard lump in his throat. “It’s Prompto. Remember me? My friends and I offered you a stay in the caravan with us. In Hammerhead.”

She contemplated as she fidgeted with the dog tag in her hand. “Yeah. I remember.”

He felt relieved, but not comfortable.

Her hand dropped. “That doesn’t answer why you were following me.”

“Well, to be honest, I was worried about you.”

“Why?’

“You were hurt. A couple weeks ago. Do you remember me asking if you were okay? On the road?” He barely remembered the details himself, as his state of inebriation was questionable.

She hesitated. “I don’t remember much about that night.” Then she turned and followed the winding alley quickly.

“Wait!” he called. He trotted after her. “I’m sorry if I’m bothering you. I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

“Yes. I’m fine,” she answered curtly.

“You didn’t look it that night. I thought…I thought that you had…” He found he couldn’t complete the thought without getting sick.

She stopped and turned, and he nearly ran into her. 

“Do I know you from somewhere?” she demanded.

“What? Yes. At Hammerhead.”

“No, before Hammerhead.”

“I-I don’t think so.”

“Then why are you still following me?”

In newly drifting light from a faraway source above them, Prompto could see it was Aura. The stormy gray of her eyes, the freckles underneath sun-darkened skin, the large assemblage of necklaces hanging from her neck. But her neck…

Without asking permission, he grabbed her shoulders and turned her more into the light. She growled and pushed him off of her with ease.

“Excuse you. Don’t fucking touch me.”

“Your wound,” he snapped, irritated and disbelieving and nauseated. Her neck and chest were naked. Unmarked. “Where is your wound?”

She pulled her hair down over her neck, eyeing him intensely. “It healed.”

“It was two weeks ago. You were cut open like a fish. There would be a stitches or a scab or _something_!” He dropped his brows and glared at her. “Did you fake it?”

“Fake it?” She laughed. “If that’s what it takes for you to leave me alone, then yes. It was staged.”

He steadied himself, despite his trembling limbs. “Do you really need me to leave you alone? I’m s-sorry, okay? I just, I don’t know. You were really, _really_ hurt that night. I don’t even know how you survived!”

“I just did.”

“That doesn’t even make sense! Short of seeing your breakfast _inside_ your stomach, I couldn’t see how anyone, even with a Phoenix Down, could have pulled through that.”

“Why are you asking me these questions? Why are you caring about me so much?” What flashed on her face when she said that turned something in Prompto’s stomach. She looked afraid.

“Because I thought there was some kind of solidarity between hunters, but I guess I was wrong. You clearly want to be left alone. Even Takka and Dave made me aware of that.”

Her voice rose in pitch, her anger melting with terror. “What in the Gods’ names do they have to do with this? Have you been asking about me?”

“Maybe. Yeah, okay, I did.” Prompto backed away slightly, hoping to calm the situation. “I was only curious. Takka said you were the best hunter around. I just wanted to know your secret.”

“My secret?” She crossed her arms. “How about hard work and patience? Self-discipline? Things a golden boy from Insomnia would know nothing about.”

A heat rose up inside him from the bowels of his gut. “Don’t insult me like that. You don’t know anything about me or where I come from.”

“I know you’re a creep. I want you to leave me alone.”

His heart hurt. More than he realized. “Gods, you’re a bitch. Sorry I tried and sorry I even cared.” He threw up his hands and turned around, storming down the alleyway alone. “You’re welcome for the dog tag back!”

Before she could retort, if in fact she had anything to retort, a rolling roar built up in the air around them, picking up speed. The ground rumbled beneath his tread, and trashcan inside a doorway beside him rattled. A light passed over the top of Prompto. He looked up. Gliding above them through the night sky was an Imperial airship, casting spotlights across buildings and through alleys. It hovered mere feet above the bulletin boards on the rooftops as it slowed to the center of Lestallum.

“Now I know that’s illegal,” he muttered to himself.

A crack ricocheted. Then two more cracks, and two more, and screams began to trickle through the streets. They built in volume and density. His hot blood became ice in a split second, and he tore down the remaining alley at a full run. He broke out of the alley back up to a wider street, where he crashed into another man running the opposite direction as him.

Prompto tried to protest, but the citizen paid no attention to him. He turned to watch him go, and the same citizen almost ran into a startled Aura. Prompto glowered when he saw her.

“Why are _you_ following _me_?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Sunshine,” she snapped, pushing past him.

Another man cut them off where they stood, running toward an alternate direction, when a sleek lance shot out and lodged into the man’s back. He fell forward, dazed, bleeding dark red against the cobblestones beneath him. 

Prompto felt nausea roll up inside him. 

The man blinked, trembling, as another figure emerged from out of the same alley. A Niflheim soldier. He approached the collapsed man, yanked out his lance, and to Prompto’s horror, speared the man again in the back of the head with a ear-splitting crack.

_No. No no no no._

Aura, who stood just ahead of him, withdrew and tried to retreat back down the alley. The soldier yanked up his lance, turned, and saw the two of them standing there.

“Fuck,” Prompto whispered. He summoned his gun, Rebellion, from thin air and aimed down its sight. He opened his mouth to compromise, to try and tell the soldier to back down, when two more soldiers appeared from down the same alley.

“No way,” Aura said beside him.

When a fourth soldier joined them, without hesitating, Prompto dematerialized his gun and grabbed Aura’s hand.

“Run!” he snapped at her, and took off back the way they came.

Though he expected her to, she didn’t fight him. She tightened her grip on his hand and ran beside him. She turned where he turned, remaining by his side, while the soldiers pursued them. Prompto tried several times to yell at their pursuers and ask them to back down. Their armored steel boots clamored angrily behind them against the stone path in response.

The two of them turned a corner sharply, following a narrow alley that ran parallel to the one they exited from, and headed up the hill. Without thinking, he shoved Aura into the shadowed crease between two buildings and continued running without her. He hoped, at the very least, he could divert the soldier’s attention away from her while she escaped. He didn’t understand why he did it so willingly without thought.

The distant pops of gunfire echoed throughout Lestallum. The varied screams from citizens made it all the more real for him. 

_This is happening. It’s really happening._

His lungs were giving, and a stitch in his side slowed him down. He turned another corner, and ran headlong into a dead end. The door at the end of the alley met him with nailed boards and piles of trash. He skidded to a stop, panting, and turned around.

The four soldiers didn’t slow in their progress. His heart lightened knowing none of them had found and pursued Aura, but it darkened when he saw his own fate lying before him. He summoned Rebellion and aimed in the center of the group.

“Stop, or I’ll shoot,” he yelled. His voice cracked, reducing his intimidation threefold.

Two soldiers raised their rifles in response, and Prompto fired Starshell. The bullet exploded into a shining aura of piercing light, immediately reducing the soldier’s capabilities, and his as well. He could feel the effects of his own skill sinking into his muscles and turning them to rubber. Fatigue washed over him, and his bravery reduced. He believed, now, he stood no chance against the group. Tears welled in his eyes as he blinked back the blinding light, awaiting his demise.

A calamity of whirring, buzzing sounds filled the air.

Prompto tensed his muscles, feeling nausea overcome him as he waited for some sort of impact, and yet, none came. He pried his own eyes open as the Starshell began to fade in intensity, and the soldiers had fallen, one by one, to bloodstained stones beneath them. His Starshell disappeared as stars flashed at the edge of his vision, and he saw Aura standing behind them, her black gloves fitted over her hands.

“Come on!” she yelled.

He didn’t hesitate. He sheathed his gun and leapt over the Imperial bodies toward her. She led him at a run back down the way they had come, back toward the main square in the city.

“Just so you know, this doesn’t make us friends,” she snapped beside him. “I still think you’re a creep.”

“And you’re still a bitch,” he replied. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you die.”

“I can handle myself, thanks,” she said, panting.

They emerged out of the street into the main square, and his heart stopped. All around them, Imperials. Bodies of massacred citizens scattered through the streets. More citizens were being rounded up into groups, women and children in particular. Armored soldiers surrounded and ushered them down the streets. A young man his age bolted by, and was gunned down mere feet from where Prompto stood. The Imperials were killing escapees.

At the end of the square, down by the main street running at the rim of Lestallum’s outskirts, a blockade of soldiers formed a line, with four Veles-BIS machines and two Imperial airships.

His throat felt dry. “I have to find my friends.”

She let out an unstable laugh. “You know none of these Imperials are going to let you.”

“But Noctis. He…he needs me…”

“You’re telling me the Prince is here?” she asked, disbelieving. “They must know then.”

“I-I don’t know,” he answered, “but why else would they be here?”

A battery soldier nearby noticed and yelled at the two of them to not move. Though he knew they survived a better chance not budging from their spot, Prompto also knew he could not afford to be rounded up by the soldiers. He had to get to his friends. He had to make sure, out of the three of them, Noctis was all right. It was his job after all.

“Don’t you dare,” she whispered to him, as if she could see his thoughts.

Noctis’ safety outweighed his own. Without thinking, and without warning Aura, he ran. A pelt of bullets pummeled the brick wall behind him. They really were killing runners. 

Prompto didn’t get very far. He barely reached the end of the street before a bullet pierced through his calf muscle. The pain ripped through his leg, and he screamed as he fell to his hands and knees. His leg ran hot and cold. He picked himself back up as a second bullet exploded through his hip, and suddenly, his right leg was incapacitated. He half-laid, half-knelt on the other leg, his elbows keeping him from collapsing completely. He rose one trembling hand to his pelvis, feeling the warmth of wetness spreading through the waist of his pants. He felt clammy. Ice prickled his arms and the base of his stomach. The bullet cleared right through his hip, from back to front. He patted his vest pocket, and discovered he didn’t have a potion on his being. Panic began to run its course through his veins.

Though any one of the Imperial soldiers around him could have ended his life, their preoccupations with other citizens kept them from focusing on him. Instead, as Prompto rolled over on his back, the one soldier who had shot him approached with his rifle raised. Prompto raised one bloodstained hand in defeat, beseeching the soldier to back down, please, when the buzzing noise filled the air again. A shining silver disc zipped across his vision and disappeared in a flash. He blinked. The soldier didn’t move, didn’t fire his weapon. Prompto thought he had imagined it. And then, to his horror, the soldier’s head moved, slightly, off-kilter. Blood bubbled black around the soldier’s neck, until his helmeted head slid off his body completely. It landed with a thump, and rolled back down the hill before the rest of the body collapsed in a heap.

Prompto’s breath expelled from him completely.

Aura stood behind the body, breathing heavily. She approached Prompto, but instead of helping him to his feet, she stood over top of him, her boots planted on both sides of his legs as if protecting him like a mother would a child.

She didn’t look at him as a handful of soldiers, who had seen the decapitation of their fellow man, turned their aggressive attention toward her. 

“Can you stand?” she asked.

He knew he couldn’t. He felt his energy falter him quickly as he swam through nausea. “N-no.”

“Try,” she demanded.

He swallowed hard, and slowly lifted himself with his hands. Pain erupted through his side as he stood to a shaking remaining leg. Sweat prickled at his brow, but he was standing.

“I need you,” she said.

He nodded, sick, and summoned Rebellion again. At the very least, he knew if he could materialize his weapon, Noctis was still alive somewhere nearby.

Prompto looked at Aura and took in the furrowed concentration of hostility on her face. She glanced back at him, met his eyes with hers, and his bravery instantly returned. Somehow, in a way he couldn’t explain, he felt like her presence gave him strength, despite their odds and the searing pain enflaming his right side. She nodded, and flicked her wrists. Within her hold, two shining, silver chakrams materialized from stardust, one in each gloved hand. The bladed discs hung from her fingertips, ready.

He pressed his back to hers, and faced the throng of Imperials before him. Two groups of innocent citizens fled as their captors placed their attention on Prompto and Aura. Battery soldiers and spearmen readied their weapons, as a line of riflemen took their place behind them.

He knew he would not survive this.

His other hand flicked a line of bullets into his gun, and with a twitch of his wrist, the chamber fell into place. He steadied himself, pulling in all his remaining energy to prepare for another Starshell. His vision swam as he gathered his resources. One of the soldiers told Prompto to stand aside, but this only provoked him to lean his weight on his bad leg and stand more stoic against Aura. He couldn’t care who the Imperials wanted—he would not allow her to die. Not after assuming she had been dead already.

An Imperial nearby tightened his grip on his sword, and Prompto inhaled deep and fired another Starshell, higher this time than the last. The revolving aura of energy sucked in all straggling outliers within his vision and reduced their strengths. Several shielded their eyes against the blinding light. He aimed, and popped off five riflemen quicker than they had time to open their eyes. He felt Aura shift her hips and throw her chakrams out in front of her. Their buzzing made him feel cold inside all over again. He could hear the slice of flesh, and the thudding of bodies—or body parts—hit the ground behind him.

Materialized bullets flew from his hand into the chamber again, and another twitch of his wrist closed the chamber. With one bullet, he had the luck to pierce two heads. But it was only a matter of time. He knew, no matter how many he could quickly take out, he would not leave this alive.

And he was right. He managed to nail one more soldier between the eyes of his helmet when a barrage of bullets from the one remaining rifleman exploded through Prompto’s stomach and out his back. 

His body erupted into orgasmic pain. Weakened, his Rebellion fell from his hand and clattered to the stones. And he realized, with absolute despair, Aura’s hips still sat against his. 

And he knew.

She didn’t make a sound behind him. She merely stiffened and stilled. He heard the clang of her chakrams hit the ground. The same bullets that pierced through him lodged in her.

The world swayed and rang in his ears, and he couldn’t feel either of his legs beneath him. He looked down, touched his fingers against one of the holes in his shirt. The blood spread, soaking his garments. It felt cold against his stomach, hot against his fingertips. He wasn’t sure if he was feeling any pain anymore. He couldn’t feel anything except the warmth of fingertips on the inside of his palm. Aura’s hand had found his, her glove discarded. He gripped her hand. Unending starriness frayed the edge of his vision. He looked up, seeking out the soldier who shot him, when a greatsword’s Maelstrom exploded the remaining line of Imperials in a sea of blood.

Prompto saw the stones rise to meet him, and he crumbled to the ground, unsure is he was alive. Unsure of anything, really. The only thing he felt, knew for absolute certain was there, was Aura’s hand clutching his. The faint sounds of combat drifted further away. Lines of blue swam in his eyesight. But he focused only on her hand, the warmth of her fingers in his. The fire she left there in his palm.

When her hand was ripped from his, the cold returned again. Someone hoisted him over their shoulder. His naked hand screamed for hers again, but nothing returned to it. 

The remaining events blurred in and out of his consciousness, in and out of the realm of sleep. Wispy luminescence radiating from the Disc of Cauthess pierced into his soul. The distant roar of a car engine, from memories, from present day, from a future he had yet to experience. An explosion blew like a small firecracker. In the spaces between the stars, he saw a little girl’s face, bleeding, as she lightly pressed her shaking fingertips to his lips to silence him. Then someone gripped his hand again, hard, and used it to smash a glowing orange object into the barrel of his chest.

Frostiness scratched Prompto’s skin like ice feathers, and at once, the world exploded around him with overwhelming stimulation. He gasped before he let out a scream building in his chest. Sensations of new life returned to him. But his body, too besieged from trauma, slipped him back into the solitude of sleep.

Before unconsciousness overcame him, he felt the warmth of fingers clutch his hand again. And then, it grew dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is taking me for a ride. I'm super excited to continue sharing it with you guys.
> 
> And thank you for the kudos! Each one is like a little ray of sunshine in my heart! :)


	4. Chapter 4

_The blonde girl on the other side of the glass wall lay her head down on the sterile floor. She stared at Prompto with curiosity brimming in her eyes. “Do you dream?” she asked in a soft voice._

_“Sometimes.”_

_She pressed her hand against the glass. “What do you dream about?”_

_Prompto placed his hand against hers, the cool glass between their fingers, keeping them from touching. “You.”_

The hiss of a fire log tickled Prompto’s ears. His face warmed underneath the light of its flame as it stirred him to wake from a deep, soundless sleep. Voices murmured nearby while the static-laced voice of a reporter echoed through a radio handset. His eyelids fluttered open slowly. Before him, a campfire blazed in a pit. The only light in the darkness.

He turned his head to see he was bundled in a sleeping bag. His head throbbed and his mouth felt sticky with dehydration. He moved to push himself up to his elbows, but pain burst through his abdomen, and he dropped immediately with a cry.

“Prompto’s awake,” Gladio whispered.

A shuffle of movement, and Ignis knelt by Prompto’s side. He wiped the sweat off Prompto’s brow with a cool, damp cloth, then placed a potion in his weak grip. Prompto could barely hold onto it.

“How are you faring?” Ignis asked quietly.

“Where’s Aura?” His voice was merely a crackle in his throat.

“…Prompto…”

“Please tell me you took her, too.”

Ignis sighed. “Yes. Now take this.” He tapped his finger against the glass bottle in Prompto’s hand.

Relief flooded him. Nodding, Prompto weakly forced his fingers closed until the potion popped. The glass shards disintegrated as the wash of cool blue traced delicately over his skin and seeped inside. He felt lighter, healthier, and slightly more awake. Beneath the sleeping bag, he could feel his skin stitch together and scar over.

“Oh, Gods, what happened?” he asked, now able to push himself up to a sitting position. He dropped his forehead into his hand, feeling the fire radiating there.

“We’re at a haven in southern Duscae. We drove most of the night until we could find an area not occupied with Imperials.”

His heart stutter-stepped as he remembered.

“Niflheim attacked us,” Prompto muttered. “And…Insomnia?”

“Insomnia is still safe under King Regis’ protection. However, it goes without saying the peace treaty signing fell through.”

“But…” He almost didn’t want to ask.

“But Lestallum has fallen under Imperial control. As collateral.”

“Collateral for what?”

Ignis exhaled hard. “The Empire knew of Noct’s presence in Lestallum.”

Another heavy hit to his chest. “Is…is he…?”

“He’s fine. Everyone is fine. A little shaken up though.” He paused before handing Prompto the damp cloth. “But your friend still hasn’t woken up from her unconsciousness.”

“But she will,” he blurted out. “She survived something out in the desert at Hammerhead. She’ll survive this.”

“We did the best we could. We administered a Phoenix Down, but like you, she was so far into…well…it may take awhile for her to wake.” Ignis pulled off his glasses and rubbed the tired from his reddened eyes. “To be quite frank, Prompto…”

Prompto felt another hardening lump form in the back of his throat.

“…I don’t understand how either of you survived.”

“W-what does that mean?”

“You should have died. Both of you.”

Prompto didn’t want to think about it. He lifted the damp cloth to his hot face. “You got to us in time. That’s all.”

Ignis cleared his throat, as if he might say something additional, but instead he patted Prompto’s hand. “Just…get some more rest. I’ll rouse you if she wakes.”

He nodded, and Ignis slid his glasses back on and rose to rejoin Gladio near the radio.

Prompto didn’t remember falling asleep again. When he woke the second time, the fire had died out to a smoldering glow. Gladio was still awake, sitting in a chair with the radio in his hand and staring at the embers. An emergency bulletin, on repeat, ordered Lucian citizens to find refuge in Insomnia. The dawn barely shimmered dusty blue behind black silhouettes as it chased away the night. Prompto lifted himself up, feeling the pull of new scars across his stomach and right hip.

“Hey,” he mumbled to Gladio.

“Hey.” Gladio’s eyes remained fixed ahead.

“Any news?”

A grimace formed on his mouth. “Not a lot.”

“But Insomnia is okay?”

“For now. The rest of Lucis though…” He trailed off.

Prompto dropped his forehead—not burning this time—back down to his hand. “Is Noct okay?”

Gladio sighed. “Not really.”

He shook his head. “B-but…I don’t understand. I thought things were peaceful.”

“They were.”

Another thought crossed Prompto’s mind. “We’re supposed to be in Tenebrae in a few days. Is Tenebrae okay?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t heard anything.”

He shook his head. “We can’t go to the conference. They’ll hurt Noct if he shows up.”

“Well, then I guess our job just got a lot harder.”

He pressed his hands together, nervous about his next question. “What exactly happened? In Lestallum?”

Gladio finally turned his gaze up to Prompto, then leaned forward and dropped his elbows on his knees, holding the radio in both hands. “After you left, wherever you went, the main street down by the parking lot filled with Imperial soldiers. They were keeping people from leaving, but wouldn’t tell anyone why. Then an Imperial airship flew over and deposited, like, two dozen soldiers into the streets. All riflemen. Without warning, they began firing. Anyone. Anywhere. Didn’t matter what age or gender. When people saw what was happening, they started fleeing. Noct wanted to help people in the city. He wanted to find you. Iggy and I tried to get him to run. But he wouldn’t. So we had to drag him out of there, with no idea where you had gone.”

Prompto dropped his head.

“We ran for it. Tried to get to the Regalia, and then we saw you. Your Starshell let us know where you were. We tried to reach you in time, but you had already been shot. You and the girl. Both of you collapsed. So the three of us wiped out the remaining soldiers. It was…a slaughter…before we even arrived. Body parts everywhere.”

Prompto closed his eyes, willing the ache to go away as he listened.

“I carried you, Ignis carried the girl. Noct worked on clearing a path to the Regalia. He managed to take out one of those Magitek machines by himself. We got to the car, damaged it a bit driving through the soldier blockade. Ignis drove, and I gave you and your friend Phoenix Downs. We eventually ended up here.” He sighed, pressing the radio tight between his hands. “The news is just saying the same thing, over and over. Seek refuge in Insomnia. This was a targeted attack to assassinate the Prince of Lucis. No word if the Prince is alive or not. And our phones don’t work, so none of us can call home. We can’t reassure King Regis that Noct is alive. I can’t reach my sister, Iris. All communication, short of radio waves, has been cut off throughout Lucis.”

Prompto instinctively reached for the phone in his pocket and pulled it out. As Gladio said, a red slash marred the corner of his phone where the service bar should be.

“Now what?” he mumbled.

Gladio shook his head. “I don’t know. I want to return to Insomnia. Iggy said that would be a bad move, and that it’ll only be a matter of time before Insomnia falls, given the King’s health. And there’s no guarantee we would even make it unharmed. They’ll almost expect us to go back and be waiting. So, Iggy wants to proceed to Tenebrae. He says showing up to the conference shows Noct is still alive to the citizens of Lucis and Insomnia, but also helps unite the remaining countries against Niflheim. He also said the Seershand will be there, and they can help protect Noct.”

“You mentioned the Seershand at the restaurant. What is that?” Prompto asked.

A smirk blemished the side of Gladio’s mouth. “You thought only Lucian royalty needed protection?”

He thought for a moment, trying to figure it out. “The Oracle. Lady Lunafreya has her own guard?”

“Yeah. Twelve women ready to die for their Lady.”

“I never knew that.”

“It’s not common knowledge, so don’t fret.” Gladio exhaled hard. “Regardless of which direction we go, we can’t decide until Noct wakes. It doesn’t matter what I think, or what Iggy thinks. But I feel pretty strongly about my opinion.”

Prompto nodded. He picked at the corner of the cloth Ignis had given him hours before, now dry. Several minutes passed before he cleared his throat and spoke again. “So, I have to ask…why did you bring Aura?”

“Who, the girl?”

“If there were injured citizens everywhere, why did you grab her?”

Gladio’s eyes glinted in the shadows of his brow. “You mean, you don’t remember?”

He turned his palms up. “Gladio, I was shot. I don’t remember _anything_ clearly.”

“You begged me to take her. You were gripping her hand so hard it took everything I had to make you let go of her.”

Prompto blinked hard, trying to remember. He didn’t remember speaking at any time. The only thing he did remember was her hand in hers. But only because she held his hand, not the other way around.

“Is she okay?”

“Like Iggy said, she hasn’t woken yet.”

“But…she’s okay?”

A darkness passed over Gladio’s eyes. “Prompto. Stop it.”

Prompto’s heart thudded against his breastbone several times. An aching feeling ripped through his chest to his neck as he prepared to defend himself.

“Seriously, man,” Gladio continued. “She’s nobody. Why are you so bent out of shape over a stranger? This isn’t like it’s Cindy, or even one of us.”

“I can’t care about the well-being of someone else?” His heart began thudding faster.

“Not like this,” he snapped. “Your interest in her has gone overboard, and it’s not okay. Always a skirt-chaser, until the bitter end.”

“I-I haven’t done anything wrong,” he stammered, glaring. “Please don’t make this into something superficial.”

“Will you just stop and look at this?” Gladio’s voice raised an octave as he swung his arm behind him where the tent lay. “We risked our lives because you wouldn’t fucking let go of her. You risked your life because you ran off before the ships descended. I imagine you were chasing her, right?”

He didn’t respond.

“You know, I hate saying it, but we could have gotten Noct out of Lestallum quicker if it weren’t for you. And here you are, asking about her condition before anyone else’s? Before your best friend’s? Her name was the first thing out of your mouth. What is wrong with you, Prompto?”

“ _I don’t know!_ ” he suddenly shouted, gripping the rag tight in his fist. Even he was startled by the brashness of his own voice. “I don’t know, Gladio! For the past two weeks, I haven’t been able to get her out of my head. And she shows up again, alive, and…I-I don’t know. I have no answer for you. I can’t even make up an answer.”

Gladio hesitated a moment before he dropped his voice low. “Well, you better figure out an answer, and soon. Whatever itch you got in your head—or your pants—you get rid of it. Now. Because the last thing we need as Crownsguard, in a time of crisis like this, is for one of our own getting caught up in some sort of starry-eyed, twitterpated distraction. Noct needs us. Not the girl. Not anyone else. Noct. Got it?”

Shaking, Prompto nodded and stared off into the distance.

Gladio finally stood and walked over to Prompto. He dropped the radio in Prompto’s lap and retreated back to the tent. “Do us all a favor and be useful for a change.”

Prompto picked the hand radio up from his lap and clutched it hard. The same emergency bulletin echoed through it in a female’s monotone voice. His throat closed, and his jaw trembled. He stared at the radio until it blurred through burning tears, its exterior blending with the black of his pants. He didn’t understand anything that was happening. He didn’t understand what he did, or how he could redeem himself from it. The girl Aura crossed his thoughts again and he shook, closing his eyes. She was a nobody. Why did he care so damn much?

One of his hands pressed against his abdomen, against a spot he knew had been punctured by a bullet. He felt the thickness of a bandage there under his shirt, and imagined he could see the bleeding hole in his memories. He had been shot at least ten times. Maybe more. And he survived. Past the point of a Phoenix Down, and he still survived.

And Aura survived, too. Here and in Hammerhead. The gaping cut in her torso flashed in his head, and he begged the memory to retreat. She pulled through an injury of that magnitude like it were nothing more than a minor headache. His heart hurt when he thought of her face when he confronted her about it. She had looked terrified, for whatever reason she had.

The dawn brightened over the horizon, but Prompto didn’t watch it to see the sun rise. He sat in the puddle of sleeping bag around his hips and stared at the radio as long shadows shortened over the campsite. Before anyone could rise to greet him, or chastise him, he set the radio upright next to his sleeping bag and stood. He felt sore all over. His muscles pulled in new ways, and the fresh skin on his own body felt foreign. His calf stretched strangely, but he pushed the sensations away. He would adapt over time, like others before him. Like Gladio had at one point. They were only scars now, not bullet wounds.

He took it upon himself to walk the perimeter of the campsite alone in the dawn. The night burned away and left behind a glistening of dew on foliage leaves. He brushed his hand through a bush, pulling it away cool and wet. Several drops slipped underneath his leather wristband. Beneath his tread, his boots left deep prints in the damp earth. Within a clearing ahead in a thicket of trees, a pack of Garulas moaned awake as they slowly pulled themselves up from their slumber. Prompto took a wide path around them, wishing not to be the reason they stirred.

He walked for an hour, not thinking of anything really, until he reached a clearing in the trees leading to a shelf of rock. The shelf looked out over the entirety of Duscae. He stepped up to the edge, feeling the warmth of the morning sun against his face, and forced himself to find Lestallum.

He didn’t have to look hard. Miles away, beyond the glimmering Disc, beyond the Taelpar Crag, a rise of black smoke trailed through the air. Several black airships dotted the sky, between their location and Lestallum. Two additional trails of black smoke circled lazily through the air on the horizon, though their locations he could not determine. One he guessed was Old Lestallum, where they had seen construction of a great cement garrison nearly a month prior.

Reluctantly, he patted the pockets of his remaining clothes and felt the bulge of his camera in his back pocket. He pulled it out, thankful it had not been damaged in the upheaval, and snapped a photo of the landscape. In the viewfinder, it was hauntingly beautiful. Tragic, even. A dry nausea churned through his stomach when he pocketed the camera again, not wanting to look at the photo, or the landscape, any further. He turned and retreated back to the campsite.

When he returned, Noctis and Ignis were both awake, though they failed to acknowledge Prompto when he climbed the incline. Noctis sat by the dead campfire and simply stared at the hand radio, as if willing it to produce some new information. Ignis pulled together a stronger than usual pot of coffee in the press. Prompto ignored both of them and ducked into the tent.

Nearby, Gladio dozed on the top of his sleeping bag, his back to the entrance. And on the opposite end, furthest from Gladio and the entrance, a comatose Aura slept.

Quietly, Prompto crawled on hands and knees over the sleeping bags to where she slept and laid down beside her. Her face was wan with sickness. A light mist of sweat clung to her forehead over sunken, reddened eyes, and most of the muscles in her face were tense. He gently traced his finger across her brow and pushed away a dark string of hair clinging to her face. He wondered briefly what she dreamt about. Then he ducked his hand into her sleeping bag and found her hand, locking his fingers with hers beneath the material. Her hand was like fire, pulsing with a warmth that instantly encouraged comfort within him. He smiled sadly, thinking how he had almost failed her, this beautiful stranger in front of him, and how it would not have been the first time he failed someone before.

And before he knew it, clutching her hand in his, Prompto drifted off to sleep.

* * * * *

The argument between the four of them lasted hours. Gladiolus wanted to head back to Insomnia. Ignis wanted to continue to Tenebrae. Prompto could see the benefits to both arguments, but ultimately, it was Noctis’ decision to make. The problem that presented itself was that Noctis couldn’t decide.

None of them were hungry. They spent most of the day in a daze with little sleep and empty bellies. Early afternoon came quicker than they would have liked, and yet, they still lingered at the campsite with no visible destination in front of them. Gladio filled the time with uncontrollable belligerence. Despite Ignis’ calm and collected logic, he too, lost control several times and smarted back. They were circling around each other, snapping teeth, and getting nowhere.

“The Kingsglaive is back home. I know nothing about the Seershand or their fighting capabilities. They protect a fucking princess, not a king.”

“We shouldn’t be so quick to rule out a whole guard simply because of their sex. They don’t have to possess brute strength to protect anyone.”

“Don’t make this into a sexist thing, Iggy, because it’s not. I’m saying the Oracle doesn’t deal with the kind of antagonists King Regis does. This is apples to oranges.”

“The Seershand has had more interaction with Niflheim than either the Kingsglaive or the Crownsguard. They know the antagonist even better than we do. So I say we seek refuge with them.”

"Twelve. Women. Twelve women barely holds a candle to the immense number of Insomnia’s guards.”

“I thought you said this was not a sexist thing, Gladio.”

They ping-ponged off of each other, back and forth while Prompto paced and Noctis still sat beside the cold ashes, silent. The argument was never-ending, but they didn’t know what else to do. Prompto didn’t want to sleep anymore, couldn’t muster the desire to eat, yet he didn’t want the silence of not talking. And Noctis simply said nothing. He barely contributed to any interaction around him, even though the other three needed him to. It was well into the third hour, as Ignis’ and Gladio’s voices were beginning to crack, Prompto dropped himself beside Noctis.

“We have to figure something out before they kill each other,” he mumbled out of the side of his mouth. “Any ideas?”

But Noctis only sighed.

“C’mon, Noct. You have to make the decision. We can’t wait for new information on the radio. If the Imperials truly are taking the Lucian countryside, they’ll eventually find us.”

“I know,” he muttered.

“Well, instead of the pros and cons, try this. Your betrothed, or your father?”

An uncomfortable laugh fell from Noctis' mouth. “So, my future wife, who I’ve seen only a handful of times, or my absent father, who I’ve also seen only a handful of times.” He shook his head. “Who cares?”

“We do. You do, deep inside. Or at least, you should.”

“No, Prompto. I really, really don’t.”

“Look, we know Insomnia is safe. The King’s health will last, regardless of what Iggy says. Tenebrae may not be as safe. Niflheim is right next door, despite the Seershand’s presence. So do you want to go somewhere safe to protect yourself, or somewhere unsafe to protect someone else?”

“You mean Luna.”

“Duh.”

“She doesn’t need me. I would only get in the way and invite trouble. Once Niflheim sees I arrive in Tenebrae, that’s where their attention will be. And then she will be worse off.”

“So does that mean you are leaning toward Insomnia?”

“If we return, it will mean I failed the Royal Arms mission given to me.”

Prompto barely contained the scoff. “That is the last thing you need to care about, man.”

Noctis closed his eyes and dropped his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Whether I do or not, you still have to decide something. Waiting here isn’t safe.”

Noctis took several minutes to breath, head dropped, while Ignis and Gladio continued their heated discussion. Prompto leaned back on his hands and stared straight ahead, waiting for his friend to decide. Finally, Noctis raised his head and stood.

“I’ve decided,” he said slowly.

Ignis and Gladio both trailed off their sides of the debate. They stared at Noctis, anticipating his decision.

“I want to return to Insomnia.”

A quiet ‘fuck’ fell out of Ignis’ mouth before he crossed his arms. Gladio did not look overjoyed, but his tensed muscles relaxed slightly.

“We need to leave now, then,” Gladio said. “Before the situation progresses to the point we can’t use the roads anymore.”

Noctis agreed with a silent nod.

Prompto stood, dusting his hands off on his pants, and headed toward the tent. But before he could reach it, Gladio’s hand jutted out and smacked Prompto square in the chest, stopping him. “No, we need to discuss one more thing.”

“But you said we need to leave now.”

Gladio narrowed his eyes. “Yeah. We do. But if you’ve forgotten, someone still hasn’t woken up yet.”

Prompto’s heart started thudding in his chest, violently. “Okay…?”

“I say we leave her.”

“Fuck you.” The insult tumbled out of Prompto’s mouth before he could stifle it, yet somehow, he didn’t regret saying it. “We’re not leaving her. She goes with us.”

“We can’t afford to nurse an unconscious stranger. Not when there are so many others who could use our help. She'll only slow us down.”

“You’re doing a fantastic job of pissing people off today, big guy,” Prompto snarled. “I’ll do it. I’ll take care of her, I’ll carry her. You don’t have to do a damn thing.”

“Noct first, others second.” Gladio’s eyes darkened. “Or did you already forget that?”

“I hate to say this, Prompto,” Ignis said from behind him slowly, “but I’m going to have to agree with Gladiolus here.”

“Then fuck both of you,” he snapped. He tried to step around Gladio to the tent, but Gladio’s muscled figure easily blocked Prompto with minimal effort.

“This is not a decision I’m leaving to Noct,” Gladio said. “We gather our things, but she stays here.”

“Just leave her? Out in the open, where anything can harm her while she recovers?”

“We’ll leave a potion with her if she wakes. That’s all we’re going to do.”

“She saved my life!” Prompto snapped, his hands balling into fists. He fought the urge to hit Gladio, knowing the big guy would barely feel the impact. “She could have run off and found safety, but instead, she killed four soldiers to save me. I’m not leaving her.”

“She’s nobody, Prompto!” he growled, stepping up into Prompto’s face. “How do we even know she isn’t from Niflheim? At this point, we shouldn’t trust anyone until we’re safe in Insomnia.”

“If she’s from Niflheim, you really think she would have willingly killed her comrades for her enemy? She’s a harmless hunter…a hunter who saved my life. I owe it to her to save hers.”

“She could have saved Noct’s life and I still wouldn’t take her. It’s nothing more than a burden to care for someone in her condition.”

“Noct?” Prompto spun around and eyed his friend. “Please take my side.”

But Noctis' lips formed into a grimace, and he dropped his gaze, avoiding Prompto’s.

“Please, Noct. I want to save her.” His voice tumbled out into a plea. “When she wakes, I want it to be her choice if she leaves. And I’ll be fine with it. But I just can’t live with myself if we abandon her.”

The words that came from Noctis were the ones Prompto didn’t want to hear. “We can leave some supplies for her,” he offered. “A potion, some food and water, and one of the blankets. But we can’t take her with us.”

Prompto could feel the tears swelling under his eyelids, and he angrily blinked them away. “Then we can take her to the nearest outpost. Or town. Or house. Somewhere where someone else can help her.”

“We need to avoid any and all social interaction if we’re to make it to Insomnia alive,” Ignis said. “Any wind of our whereabouts cannot reach the Imperials. It’s difficult enough driving such a recognizable vehicle.”

Noctis closed his eyes. “We leave her, Prompto. And if you can’t accept that, you can stay here with her when we go.”

His heart ached. Memories of nightmares began creeping through Prompto’s thoughts and he couldn’t simply wish them away. He felt useless. The others didn’t understand. They would never understand what it feels like to have someone else’s fate directly in your hands. To them, she was nobody. And though he tried to tell himself the same, he couldn’t think of her as a nobody. She was a representation of somebody he once cared about. Perhaps he felt he could redeem certain aspects of his past by helping her. The ache flourished, and at once, he felt inexplicably alone. In body and spirit. Tears fell down the corners of his nose, and he couldn’t blink them away. He let them fall, defeated.

“Fine,” he whispered. “We leave her.”

But before anyone could move to gather supplies, before anyone could make a word of agreement, the sound of the tent flap rustled behind him. Ignis’ eyes widened slightly, looking past Prompto, and Noctis' mouth dropped. Prompto ran one heel of his hand across the underside of his eye and turned around. A pain ripped through the ache of his chest as his tears fell faster.

Aura stood, color restored completely to her face, in the threshold of the tent. She looked as alive and awake as the other three looked. Her bright eyes darted back and forth between all four of them before they settled on Prompto. The gray storm in them churned with life when their gaze met.

Then she parted her lips, and said, “Hey there, Sunshine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm caring a lot about this story. A lot more than I thought I would for my first fanfiction in ten years.
> 
> Once again, thanks for the kudos, and thanks for the read! :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact: I work in a place where I can listen to my headphones for the full eight hours every day, Monday through Friday. When I first had the idea for this story, I listened to a song called "Limitless (feat. Delaney Jane)" by Adventure Club. It kinda explains the title for the story and the running theme behind it.
> 
> Once again, enjoy! :)

Despite the urgency of Gladio’s insistence they depart for Insomnia immediately, they ended up remaining at the campsite a bit longer than they thought as they processed Aura’s sudden and complete recovery.

Ignis, quicker to accept the situation before the others, registered for the first time that none of them had eaten, having lost out on dinner the night before with the subtraction of breakfast and lunch. He pulled himself away from the others, who all sat around the dead campfire staring at Aura, and fiddled with pans on the portable stove.

She paid them no mind as she in turn processed the new information of the capture of Lestallum. She listened to the radio and the emergency bulletin, and avoided the gaze of the other three. More specifically, she avoided Prompto’s.

When Gladio ceased retelling his side of the story a second time, one could tell he looked incredibly uncomfortable. He fidgeted in his seat and twisted his hands around themselves, watching her reaction. It irritated Prompto to no end to see the Prince’s shield so obviously ignoring the fact he was willing to abandon her in a comatose condition. Perhaps Gladio was feeling the pangs of guilt. Prompto could only hope for that much.

She switched radio channels, hearing the same bulletin on each one, and no one asked what they all wanted to ask her.

Prompto himself didn’t even try to keep his eyes from wandering. They fell on her naked neck and scarless chest. He tried to imagine he could see some marking, but couldn’t even pretend. Her natural color flushed healthy across her cheekbones, and yet, Prompto couldn’t boast such progress even after a potion. And she hadn’t needed one.

Beside her, Gladio cleared his throat. “So, Aura, do you need anything? For the pain?”

“I’m all right. Thank you for asking.”

“We have potions. If you need one, just ask.”

She hummed a response, not agreeing, not disagreeing.

Gladio glanced around at the others underneath his brow, then sighed and tried to relax in his seat.

After several long, awkward minutes, Aura finally looked up from the radio and eyed the others. “Are you guys from Insomnia?”

They all mumbled staggered ‘yeahs’.

“I need papers to get in.”

“Under normal circumstances, you need Insomnian papers,” Noctis said, “but I don’t think they require them for refugees.”

“What I mean is, I don’t have Lucian papers.”

Noctis turned his head slightly and cut his eyes at her. “Are you illegal?”

She turned the volume of the radio down and sat it beside her before giving him her full attention. “I’m homeless. That doesn’t mean I’m not a citizen. I just don’t physically have papers.”

“Oh,” he mumbled. “Well, I don’t know then. If you don’t have any identification, they might not let you into the city.”

“Because I might be the enemy?”

“Probably for that reason.”

She nodded, chewing on the corner of her lip, then asked, “Could you vouch for me?”

“What?”

She smirked. “You’re the Prince, are you not?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“They’ll let you in, with or without papers. If I ride with you, and you escort me in, I won’t need them.”

“I suppose.”

“So can I hitch a ride with you to Insomnia?”

Noctis fell quiet as he stared down at the ground between his feet. Prompto was fully aware Ignis had stopped shuffling around pans on the stove. Gladio altogether stopped breathing.

Finally, Noctis lifted his head. “Uh, yeah. I’ll get you in.”

Prompto didn’t realize he had also been holding his breath until he let it out.

“Thank you. I appreciate it,” she said. “When did you plan on leaving?”

Again, another alarming quiet fell over them. This time, Gladio spoke.

“Actually,” he mumbled slowly, “we were kinda planning to leave immediately. But now that it’s so late, maybe we should wait for nightfall?” He glanced at the others for reassurance.

“Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be a bad plan,” Ignis said from behind the stove. 

“B-but that’s when the daemons come out,” Prompto mumbled. When he said it, he couldn’t help but glance at Aura. A quick shift of movement in her eyes made him believe she glanced at him first, and he missed it.

“Save for the daemons, driving through the night would be safer,” Ignis continued. “It will help us avoid most detection.”

“Is that what you all want to do?” Noctis asked. “Leave at nightfall?”

“Assuming the roads haven’t been blocked already, I think that would be for the best.” Soft thunks sounded from Ignis’ knife on the cutting board as he worked while he spoke. “By now, the Empire will know they failed in their assassination attempt. Soon, if not already, they will also know Noct is not in Lestallum. It is only a matter of time before they begin searching the roads to Insomnia, knowing that is where he’s headed.”

“So…yes?” Noctis asked.

Ignis sighed. “Yes.”

Noctis nodded. “All right, then. After dinner, we’ll pack up and head out.”

“In that case, I had better prepare something with staying power, assuming we will all need it to keep awake.”

Afternoon blended into evening, and for the remaining time, before dinner and during, no one spoke so much as two words to one another. Prompto paid little attention to the meal Ignis prepared—something with leafy vegetables and seafood—and ate it slowly while he watched Aura out of the corner of his eye. He stared at the spherical brown blotches across her tanktop, and the small burned holes in each center. At least seven, maybe eight spots. Despite the evidence of bloodstains, he struggled to find a marking of any kind on her skin. It was as if she had never been shot, and the idea churned his stomach.

Though Prompto didn’t make a habit of it, he offered to assist Ignis in clean-up duty. It kept his thoughts at bay and his eyes from wandering. He hated every minute of it, wiping the dishes clean and tightly packing the ingredients back into the bags and baskets, but he hated the idea of doing nothing while Aura sat nearby even more. He never polished a plate so well in all his life.

When dinner’s dishes successfully disappeared back into the baskets, the others began to gather their supplies up. Gladio dismantled the tent, Ignis folded his table for his stove, and Noctis collapsed the unoccupied chairs. Trying to ignore Aura, Prompto moved over to the tent and gathered the sleeping bags. He picked his up, shook it out of pests and dirt, and rolled it tight. He strapped it to his bag, and when he glanced up, he immediately met Aura’s gaze. He tingled underneath her stare. She pressed her lips together before rising from the remaining seat and approaching him. She stopped in front of him.

“Prompto, right?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“Yeah?”

“Can…we talk for a sec?”

“Uh, yeah. Of course.” He dropped his bag near the other ones and turned to face her.

“Not here,” she added, aware of listening ears.

“Oh.” He nodded. “Okay. We can take a walk.”

She agreed, and led him down the side of the campsite into the trees. He followed, trying hard not to stumble as he kept up the pace. Even wandering through the woods she walked fast. The whistling of evening insects trilled through the dense foliage, harbingering the night, and instantly, Prompto felt his body tire. Despite all the sleep he had earlier, he still found he could sleep more.

When she finally reached a clearing she found acceptable, she turned around and faced him. He strolled up to her, trying to keep a casual reaction despite the nervousness trembling through him.

“S-so what did you want to talk about?” he asked.

She took in a deep breath, steadying herself. “I wanted to apologize. For my behavior in Lestallum. It was completely uncalled for, especially after everything you and your friends have done for me since we met.”

Prompto smiled small. “You didn’t have to pull me into the woods to tell me that. It’s okay. I was a little too much back there anyway.”

“No, you weren’t. You were incredibly kind to have worried about me. I’m not used to that. I was immediately suspicious and I didn’t need to be.” She crossed her arms again. “So, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for holding a knife to you. I’m sorry for snapping at you, and for calling you a creep.”

A heat broke out across his nose and cheeks. “I suppose, then, I’m sorry for calling you a bitch. And for stalking you.”

A smirk cracked at the corner of her lips. “I also wanted to thank you. For the night in the caravan. For helping me when I hurt myself in Hammerhead. And for saving me in Lestallum.”

He dropped his gaze, feeling flustered. “You’re welcome,” he said softly. “It’s the least I could do.”

“I just…” She swallowed, as if trying to choose her words carefully. “…I just don’t understand why you wanted to help me. I am very grateful. Truly. Are you this generous to everyone you meet?”

“Not necessarily. You just seem to put yourself in more dangerous situations than others.”

Her smirk widened. “I guess you got me there.”

He smiled back, shuffling his feet. “Well, apology accepted. Just don’t try to put any more blades to my throat.”

“I’ll try not to.” 

When his eyes wandered back up to her, he hadn’t realized how tall she really was. He noted it in Hammerhead, but now, standing face to face, he could see they were virtually the same height when neither one of them slumped. Butterflies tickled his stomach. Something about being able to look her straight in the eyes while talking felt incredibly intimate. And he liked it.

A look of confusion crossed her face. “So you truly don’t know me?” she asked.

“You mean, before Hammerhead?”

She nodded.

“No. I don’t.”

“And you’re from Insomnia?”

“Yeah.”

“You live there your whole life?”

He stilled, and tried to push through the uncomfortable feeling in his heart. “Yup. Born and raised. This, right now, is the first time I’ve been out of the city.”

“Wow,” she said, feigning awe. “So you really are a golden boy.”

“Hey, I’m not an invalid just because I haven’t spent the past five years killing aggressive beasts, thank you very much.”

Her eyebrows shot up.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, grinning. “I asked about you.”

“You really did, didn’t you?”

“You mad?” He hoped she wasn’t.

“A little surprised, as that I don’t find myself particularly interesting, but not mad.”

“Not anymore, at least.”

“I think I was more freaked out when I found out you were asking about me than mad.”

“I’m…really sorry about that. I promise I’m not a stalker.”

“Thank the Hexatheon.” She shrugged. “It’s fine. I suppose. It’s actually nice to know someone thinks about me that doesn’t want to do me harm.”

His eyebrows screwed together, concerned. “Is there someone out there that wants to hurt you?”

She shrugged again. “One can never be too careful.”

Something about her answer didn’t sit well with Prompto. She had answered this way, with vagueness, in the caravan in Hammerhead when she shut all the blinds and curtains. He had asked her if she was afraid of something. Her reply had told him nothing, then and now.

“We can head back. That’s really all I wanted to say. The apology and the thank you.”

“Oh. Uh, yeah, sure.” He gestured with his arm for her to lead the way.

He followed her back, keeping close behind until they returned to a near naked campsite. All belongings had been piled into a heap, awaiting transportation to the Regalia. Gladio and Noctis stood together, talking in low voices, while Ignis remained alone staring out at the settling horizon. He addressed Prompto and Aura when they returned.

“We’re ready, or as ready as we can be,” Ignis said, almost sourly.

“Are you okay?” Prompto asked.

A loud exhale. “No. We’re driving right where Niflheim wants us—into their waiting hands. They’ve had nearly twenty-four hours to gather troops before the border to Insomnia, not to mention the emergency bulletin is ordering people to evacuate and seek refuge there. This is not the best of Noct’s decisions, but who am I to influence that decision? Certainly not a mentor or anyone of that nature.”

“We don’t know what’s gonna happen, if anything,” Prompto responded with a shrug. It was unnerving to see Ignis in such mental turmoil. “We just have to support him, regardless.”

“I will support him until the bitter end, but that does not mean I enjoy it.”

“I don’t mean to intrude,” Aura said as she approached Ignis, “because I’m not part of this, but where did you plan to go if not Insomnia?”

“Tenebrae. Formally for a peace conference, currently for sanctuary.”

Something dark dropped in Aura’s facial features. “Why Tenebrae?”

“I had hoped for—how should I put it—a _combined_ effort in protecting Noct.”

“The Seershand,” she answered.

Ignis’ eyes widened slightly. “Oh, I was under the impression most folk didn’t know about them.”

“Most folk _don’t_ know about them,” she clarified. She chewed at the corner of her lip. “Strange question, but who’s the driver of your vehicle? Is it the Prince?”

“No, that would be my duty,” Ignis said.

“If something goes wrong at the gates of Insomnia, can you get us out of there?”

“Assuming we are still in the vehicle when things take a turn, yes. Most definitely.”

“Okay, look, if you get us out of there, and you’re still willing to go to Tenebrae, I want to accompany you there.”

Prompto’s eyes flicked up and stared at her. Her jaw was firmly set, not revealing any emotion he could decipher.

Ignis tightened his face. “I’m gathering more is going on here than you are sharing.”

“I can ensure the Prince will be protected.”

Ignis further tightened his face. “How?”

“That’s all I’m going to say.”

“Hey!” Gladio suddenly called out. “We doing this, or what?”

Prompto glanced over Aura’s shoulder to see Gladio hoisting up the four collapsed chairs on one shoulder and grabbing a duffel bag.

“All right, Aura,” Ignis replied under his breath. “If something goes wrong at Insomnia, I will take you to Tenebrae.”

She gave a curt nod.

“Right behind you,” Ignis answered Gladio.

The company gathered the remaining supplies. As they were accustomed to carrying baggage with just the four of them, Aura was left with nothing to carry. She walked behind them as Ignis and Gladio led the way down to the Regalia.

The vehicle had been hidden, driven into a thick of moss covered undergrowth and covered with large brush leaves. Aura carefully pulled the leaves from the trunk so Ignis could unlock it. They stored their camp gear, and then worked on uncovering the remainder of the car. Prompto reached the front bumper, pulling limbs and leaves from the surface, and saw the damage Gladio told him about. The Regalia’s bumper was crushed on one side like a tin can, with one annihilated headlight and a dented hood. He tried desperately to ignore the blood splatter across the grill.

When the Regalia was uncovered, they piled into the seats soundlessly. As they now had a fifth rider, Gladio sat in the front seat while Prompto took the back. Aura squeezed between Noctis and Prompto, her necklaces clinking together while she adjusted. Ignis started the engine and slowly backed out of the hole in the undergrowth, his head craned over his shoulder. He had parked the Regalia quite a ways from the road. They bounced as they rolled over rocks and uneven terrain, and finally, they dropped hard when Ignis finally backed them up onto the road. He flicked the lights on, though only the left one worked, just as the sun disappeared completely behind the landscape.

“Everyone be ready and alert,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Just take the shortest route possible and book it, Iggy,” Gladio said.

Prompto could tell Ignis withheld something sharp witted.

Ignis drove them across the southern expanses of Duscae headed southeast. He kept the Regalia’s top down, for any emergency evacuations, as he put it. Prompto rest his arms on the rim of the door and dropped his head down on them. The night wind rustled through his hair and cooled the flush of his face. He was incredibly aware of Aura’s hip sitting against his, their thighs brushing anytime one of them adjusted.

The landscape darkened as it ran by the Regalia, sliding off into the nothingness behind them. Distant trees blackened into charred foliage, rocks became shadows, until eventually, nothing beyond the Regalia’s one headlight could be seen. The moon dipped in and out of a heavy cover of clouds, barely lighting anything. 

Prompto couldn’t judge how long they rode in the vehicle before they reached the large, scenic canvas of Galdin Quay. Prompto’s heart rose then sank when he saw the once illuminated beach resort now in darkness and void of people. The vacant restaurant in the black waters look eerily uninviting. As they passed by the resort sign, a hastily scrawled cardboard sign was nailed across it reading ‘EVACUATED’.

They drove through broken mountains and Saulhend Pass, and as they passed underneath the rock bridges, a starry shadow eddied in the center of the road ahead.

Ignis dropped his foot on the accelerator and veered sharply around the shadow. The Regalia narrowly passed it before whatever it was could crawl out of the otherworld and reveal itself. Prompto turned around in his seat to look. A Yojimbo spun from the smoke, flashing the edge of its katana in the red of the Regalia’s taillights. Prompto’s stomach lurched when he turned back around. Ignis didn’t let off the accelerator until he couldn’t see the daemon in the rearview mirror anymore.

They reached the desertscape of Leide again, passing abandoned Longwythe with its vacant hotel and closed diner, and headed in the direction of Hammerhead. Several crackling Thunder Bombs tried to spawn on the road around them, but Ignis lurched past without batting an eye.

The closer they approached Hammerhead, the worse and worse Prompto’s stomach felt. He didn’t want to see the service station and the diner there darkened, yet he hoped it would be. He hoped Cindy and her grandfather Cid had left for Insomnia, but the thought still despaired him. Just two weeks ago, he had weakly pined after her. Now, he ached over the idea he had even tried.

As sure as he knew, Hammerhead was black when they reached it. Only the streetlights shed their light over the empty buildings. Even the garage door sat open, its contents revealing two vehicles abandoned mid-service. Dave’s camper was gone. As they turned right and passed it, Aura turned to watch the station disappear behind them. Her fingers flexed against the meat of her arms, displaying her apparent discomfort at seeing the area evacuated.

“Makes it more real, doesn’t it?” Noctis asked, noting her behavior as well.

“Yeah. Like all the normalcy of everyday life never happened,” she replied as she turned back around.

“As if it was only a dream,” Prompto answered. An unexplainable ache threatened to pull his heart down again. He didn’t know why.

“Where do the refugees go?” she asked. “Is there a designated building or section of the city?”

“This will be the first time I’ve experienced something like this,” Noctis replied. “So I really don’t know.”

“But I mean, outside of wartime. If someone were to enter the city with no papers or family or anything, where would they go?”

Prompto held his tongue to keep from answering.

“Uh, well, I suppose they would go to the immigration office,” Noctis said, unsure. “It’s near the southern part of the city.”

She made a sound in her throat, thinking. “But what if that person was a child?”

Prompto’s chest thudded hard, trying with effort again not to answer.

“Oh, shit,” Gladio mumbled.

Up ahead, before the border to Insomnia, heavy traffic blocked both sides of the road, headed into the city. The night glowed with the combined headlights bouncing off at least a hundred cars packed tightly together. Lucian citizens of varying ages, genders, and colors hung out of car windows and stood agitatedly outside driver and passenger doors, looking ahead. Ignis slowly pulled the Regalia up behind the last car in line, but didn’t put it in park.

“What’s going on?” Noctis asked, leaning forward to get a better look.

“Wait here. I’m going to go ask,” Gladio said. He climbed out of the passenger seat, leaving the door open, and approached the male driver of the vehicle in front of them. The man shook his head at Gladio, apparently having no idea either. Gladio proceeded up the throng, asking various individuals, until he gradually disappeared up ahead.

“I understand some degree of protocol,” Ignis murmured, “but this is unusual.” He reached down and turned on the radio. The emergency bulletin, ordering evacuation to Insomnia, still played on repeat on all the channels.

Beside Prompto, Aura straightened up and glanced over the top of the car. She looked out all around them, and out toward the desert. Then she froze.

“What’s that out there?” she whispered to Prompto, pointing into the darkness.

Prompto followed her gaze. Several large black shadows dotted the landscape at the base of one of the low mountains, beyond the entrance to the Crestholm sewer channels below. He squinted. They were bulky in texture, like buildings. A flicker of movement walked the ground beside them. And then his eyes widened.

“Iggy…,” Prompto mumbled, pulling himself back. “We should go.”

“What is it?” he asked. He followed Prompto’s pointing finger, but his eyesight was poorer in the dark than the others.

“Imperial airships.”

Across the base of the mountain lay at least a half a dozen airships, blending into the backdrop of the desert. Outside of the light of the vehicle headlights all around them, one could barely register they were there. Prompto jerked his gaze to the other side of the Regalia, and saw at least five more identical shadows lining the opposite mountain.

“They have the road surrounded,” Aura whispered.

“But they haven’t registered we’re here yet,” Prompto replied.

“Shit,” Noctis said. “This isn’t good.”

“This is what I was worried about, Noct,” Ignis said, tightening his gloved grip on the steering wheel. “This is exactly what I knew would happen.”

“Save me the ‘I told you so’ for later.” Noctis reached for the handle of his car door. “I’m going to go get Gladio.”

“No!” Prompto snapped. He reached across Aura and grabbed Noctis’ arm before he could open the door. “You’re not going anywhere. We can’t let anyone know you’re here.”

“What am I supposed to do then?” he snapped back. “Just wait around and hope he comes back? Like I did for you in Lestallum?”

Prompto’s heart dropped.

“Ignis, keep the car ready,” Aura suddenly said as she hopped up onto the back of the car and swung her legs around. “I’m going to go find him.”

Before Prompto could reach out to grab her too, she had leapt off the back of the Regalia and trotted at a hurried pace through the packed vehicles in front of her. He pushed his own door open and stood up, preparing to run after her. Then he heard something, and he stopped.

The distant popping of gunfire.

Someone screamed. And then someone else. It was Lestallum all over again.

At that moment, Aura appeared from between two parked cars, screaming at other people to run and hide. They stared, frozen and confused. She shoved a small boy back into a car and slammed the door shut behind him. Gladio emerged from beside another car, followed by two armed Niflheim assailants. One raised his rifle and fired. Three bullets ripped through Gladio’s upper arm. He barely registered it, stumbling only slightly with a pained look on his face while he kept running toward the Regalia. Nearby citizens screamed and ran, some piling back into their vehicles, and some fleeing for the desert.

Ignis cursed, then dropped his foot on the brake and revved the engine with his other. His fingers gripped the gear shift, ready at a moment’s notice. The Regalia groaned as the RPMs climbed.

Aura reached the Regalia first. She hurled at Prompto, climbing into his lap while she slammed the door shut. Gladio was right behind her, jumping over the open passenger door.

“Drive, drive!” he bellowed, clutching his bleeding arm.

But Ignis didn’t need to be told. Before Gladio’s door was even shut, before his rear ever touched the passenger seat, Ignis threw the gearshift into reverse and let go of the brake pedal. The Regalia peeled out backward down the darkened road. Several additional cars had reached the blockade behind them, and he navigated expertly through the obstacles while his head craned over his right shoulder. At the last car, he whipped it around into a U-turn, threw the gearshift into drive, and tore off.

Noctis reached into his pocket and pulled out a potion, handing it forward. Gladio grabbed it quickly and slammed it against the bleeding arm. The bottle popped and covered him with its fluorescent healing aura.

“What the fuck happened?” Noctis asked.

“I don’t know!” Gladio barked, panting. “I was asking around, and I saw them. The whole border patrol has been replaced with Niflheim soldiers. They were frisking citizens, asking questions. Soldiers were searching trunks and looking at papers. And then they saw me. They must have recognized me. They yelled something, so I started running.”

“I hadn’t even reached him. I just saw him running toward me,” Aura interjected as she climbed off Prompto’s lap. “It didn’t seem necessary to ask if he was okay.”

“What now? What do we do?” Prompto asked.

“We head for Tenebrae, like I wanted before,” Ignis said. His look was concentrated fury. “If we can make it.”

“How? Galdin Quay is abandoned.”

“Cape Shawe, south of Ravatogh. Normally it serves as the main maritime transport to Succarpe, but we should be able to find a docked boat small enough for us.”

“Anyone know how to drive a boat?” Prompto asked.

“We’ll worry about that when we get there, Prom.”

The air filled steadily with the moaning of metal and groaning of gears. At first, Prompto thought the Regalia was running out of juice, unable to take the pressure from the high speed. And then Gladio turned and looked up and over Prompto’s head.

“Oh, fuck,” he said over a breath.

Prompto snapped his head back, and his body lit with electricity, tingling him numb in fear. Three large airships sped toward them along the darkened road, narrowing in on their target. A mounted turret from one of the lower hanging ships whipped around and aimed toward them. Then the Regalia became bathed in intense white light, and Prompto shielded his eyes, unable to see anymore.

“Drive faster, Iggy!” Gladio ordered.

“She won’t go any faster! She isn’t a racecar!”

The road behind them stuttered and tore to pieces as the mounted turrets descended an angry wrath of bullets on them. The pavement exploded in zigs and zags, yet failed to reach the Regalia.

In the corner of his eye, Prompto saw Aura pulling on her black leather gloves.

“What are you doing?” he asked, panicky.

“Hold me,” she ordered as she turned around in the back seat, facing the warships behind them.

He didn’t understand what she meant, so he tentatively wrapped his arms underneath hers. Her body was like fire in his hold. Then she climbed up, nearly standing in the back seat. He suddenly understood, and tightened his grip around her thighs and stomach, practically bruising her. The wind whipped her hair into a violent hurricane before she pulled it back into a ponytail with a scrap of cloth from her pocket. With her hair out of her eyes, she flicked her wrists beside her, and out came the silver chakrams, spinning in her hand and waiting for use.

No one could even say anything. Her brash act overwhelmed them. She flung both discs out into the air. They flashed silver and white in the radiance of the spotlight, and then disappeared. A crashing explosion accompanied a swallow of darkness. Her chakrams had destroyed the spotlight. Prompto blinked heavily, appreciating the comfort the night brought to his eyesight. The chakrams returned, snapping with incredible force back into her gloved hands.

“You have a gun, right?” she yelled down at Prompto.

“Yeah?”

“Pass me to Noctis.”

He did as she ordered, and Noctis, unsure, grabbed around her waist before he tightened his hold as Prompto had done.

“Use it,” she demanded Prompto.

Nodding, he summoned his Rebellion and flicked materialized bullets into the chamber. He turned around, leaning against the passenger seat. The wind ripped his hair across his cold cheeks. He lifted his gun and aimed down its sights at a soldier manning the turret gun. Compensating for wind velocity, he fired and hit his target. The soldier flew backward from the turret and fell from the open doors. His body dropped to the road behind them. Another soldier took his place at the turret as Aura threw her chakrams out again.

Together, they were successful in taking down several targets. But they were vastly outnumbered. The Regalia neared Hammerhead again just as a fourth airship appeared in the air ahead of them, seemingly from out of nowhere. It descended quickly in front of the gas station in an effort to cut them off.

“Go off-road, Iggy!” Gladio ordered.

“She can’t handle that at this speed!”

But Gladio wasn’t listening. Before the ship fully descended, blocking the road completely, Gladio grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it, pulling the vehicle off the road. When the tires hit the sand, the entire car jumped, and Aura was thrown from Noctis’ arms onto the pavement. She hit and rolled with momentum.

Prompto didn’t hesitate. When he saw her body flung from the Regalia, he jumped from his seat without thinking twice. He dropped to the ground, hard. Behind him, the Regalia skidded to a halt, whining gears while its tires threw rocks and sand. His gun thudded to the ground nearby, and he willed it to sheathe. Though Prompto’s body screamed in agony, he ignored the pain when he scrambled up to shaking limbs. In the middle of the road, Aura trembled as she tried to pull herself up to all fours, her necklaces hanging beneath her dropped head. She bled from one skinned shoulder.

The three airships passed overhead, but the fourth one had already descended to the ground, releasing its soldiers out in front of Hammerhead. A fifth airship further back down the road descended, blocking the road on both sides.

“Aura!” he shouted as he ran toward her.

She slowly lifted her head. Their eyes met, and Prompto abruptly felt like the pain left his body. He ran faster, and when he reached her, he stooped and pulled her to her feet. Bullets pelted the ground around them. He yanked her toward the gas station, running as fast as he could, before ducking behind a parked car. The gunfire didn’t cease as it pinged across the metal surface. 

“You okay?” he asked, pushing strands of hair from her loosening ponytail out of her face. He ran his hand underneath the wound on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. I’ll _be_ fine.” She shook her head. “We can’t take this many of them. We need to run for it.”

The car they knelt behind flickered as a flame rolled underneath its hood. Prompto pulled on Aura’s hand and headed toward the open garage, praying to the Hexatheon it would provide adequate cover so they could escape through the back.

He barely saw the grenade clatter to the ground beside him as he dodged bullets between two parked cars. His heart raced. He yanked Aura away from the cars, running harder and counting the steps in his head. Five steps. Ten. Twenty. He flung her to the ground in front of him and threw himself over her, knowing at the very least, his own body could shield her from taking damage.

The grenade detonated.

Fiery shrapnel shot out, and the force of the explosion threw Prompto forward off Aura and into the metal face of another vehicle. His body slammed into it and slumped to the cement. Pain pulsated through him, akin to the pulsating of his heart. Ringing filled his ears. Every surface of exposed skin was lacerated from metal shards. He groaned, feeling the world weigh on him, melting him into the ground.

“Aura,” he moaned, her name barely an escape of air.

Thirty, maybe forty feet away, another grenade clattered to the ground.

Prompto couldn’t even inhale first.

Then, it exploded.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have reached the point in the story where more headcanon of Prompto's backstory will be filtering in. I hope the italics are not confusing.
> 
> Also, I understand that Prompto's DLC will be releasing here in June, where I am sure we will all finally hear his real backstory. Though I own the Season Pass, I will purposefully avoid playing his DLC until I have finished writing this story. I don't want things to get muddied up when I have such a direct and clear path in sight.
> 
> Thanks again for being such a supportive reading crew!

The air crawled around Prompto in undulating waves, churning light and shadows over and over until dizziness overcame him. The world pressed against his body as he righted himself to hands and knees. Shellshock rang in his ears, flooding his other senses and distorting his reality. He dropped his forehead to the ground, finding purchase against the grinding earth. Nausea swirled like a hurricane inside him.

The blaze of heat scorched his skin. Before he could register where the fire came from, he was knocked back by another explosion. He felt the world melt away, the air undulating around him and inside him as he left the ground and met it again. The grit of the earth sanded against one cheek as he landed further from the fire. A roar of wind and destruction counteracted the ringing in his head.

A hand grabbed him. Fire on his bicep. He struggled to orient himself before he felt a comforting weight against him and a voice in his face.

“Get up,” the voice said. “If you can hear me, get up.”

He obeyed the voice to the best of his abilities, though he could not distinguish up from down from side to side. He felt vaguely aware of a faraway pain in his ribcage. His vision sought something in the crawling air to hold onto, but everything spun like a gyroscope. When he believed he was on his feet, his face somehow met the ground again, burning his skinned cheek. The voice grabbed him with both hands, lifting him from underneath his arms. The _rat-a-tat-tat_ of an assault rifle against a metal surface echoed behind him. Then, a final explosion.

The force threw him at an accelerated pace, over and over through darkness until he met the ground again. He rolled downhill, into the shadows, before flipping off the edge of a small cliff like a rag doll and landing in a heap at its base. His body imploded with pain. He closed his eyes, appreciating the cool sand against his cheek, the darkness in his vision. Faraway, the sounds of fire licked the night sky.

Time passed in what could have been minutes or hours before he cracked the line of his eyelids and pulled in what he could see. Everything swam in and out of focus. His arms were pinned beneath him, numb. He struggled to push himself up.

An otherworldly growl, low and hostile, sounded from the ground nearby.

He froze. Then he reacted. He tucked and rolled, scrambling to fall back into the shadows of the cliff when the ground split apart, and a gargantuan red arm reached through and smashed the earth beside him. 

_Fuck, no. Not now._

A violent rumble vibrated Prompto through every limb, and he tripped over his own feet. A daemonic aura, formed from stars and shadow, forced up through the earth as the creature crawled into reality. A Red Giant, pulsating angry, roared and braced its glaive to pull itself out the rest of the way. Prompto pressed himself hard against the vertical stones, still fighting through dizziness. His throat was bone dry as it ached to release a scream. But nothing came out. He was too terrified to react. The Red Giant righted itself up and stood to its full, powerful height, facing the opposite direction. Prompto flicked his wrist for his gun. 

Nothing came.

His heart stopped.

He flicked his wrist again. And again. Nothing.

_Noctis._

Prompto was unable to summon his Rebellion. He tried again for his Circular Saw, but nothing appeared. His chest palpitated wildly as he scoured the ground, looking for something to use as a weapon. The Red Giant swayed back and forth, scanning the vast desertscape. It would be seconds before it would smell Prompto and the fear staining his skin.

A thud hit the ground beside him. Before Prompto could turn to see what had caused the noise, he was forced backwards and pinned underneath someone. It happened so quick, he barely registered it before Aura’s mouth hovered above his own.

“Don’t move,” she whispered.

His eyes widened, then he nodded. She straddled him, legs pressed on both sides of his hips. Her arms covered his arms. She quickly pulled the cloth from her ponytail and let it fall, surrounding his face in a curtain of dark hair. He cut his eyes over through the strands of her hair, and saw the Red Giant pivot in their direction slowly.

“Trust me?” she whispered, staring down at him.

He tightly nodded again.

She leaned down, her breath tickling his mouth, and kissed him.

At any other time, elation would have filled him. Her lips were warm and soft, lighting an emotion he thought long dead deep inside his heart. Her mouth was molded to fit his. But fear caught in his throat, and he couldn’t enjoy it. She continued to kiss him. It was then that he realized she was forcing his mouth open with her tongue. He obliged, only to receive the wettest kiss he had ever experienced.

When she parted from him, she sucked on her bottom lip. “Swallow.”

He did. Her saliva, mixed with his, slid down his throat. She tasted beautiful.

“Don’t breathe.”

He didn’t, yet he couldn’t stop the wild pounding of his chest. He wanted desperately to shut his eyes, to have been able to savor that kiss, but death lingered so close to him he could touch it.

She tilted her head slightly, looking out through her hair at the Red Giant throwing fire from its limbs. It turned fully and looked down at the two of them against the cliff. Prompto’s skin trembled. All the blood washed from his body when the daemon took several large, thudding steps toward them. A scream welled in his throat again, hammering behind his teeth to be let out. He stared as the daemon lowered down to their level, its distorted, shrunken face two feet from the curtain of Aura’s hair, and inhaled deep. Her hair flipped in the power of its breath. It snorted, breathed deep again, inching closer. Prompto could feel its fire singeing his own exposed flesh. Their bodies glowed in the light of its energy. It sniffed, snorted, sniffed again, then paused.

Prompto rattled off a distressed prayer to the Gods in his head.

But to his astonishment, the Red Giant inched back up to its full height again, slow and steady, and turned back into the opposite direction. It snarled and hissed, speaking on a guttural, daemonic tongue before heading in that way at an unhurried pace.

His breath released in a rush. “I-it’s ignoring us? W-what…why is it…”

Aura pressed one finger to his lips to silence him.

They waited several minutes, watching the Red Giant lumber far enough away and leave them in peace, before Aura dropped her gaze back down to Prompto beneath her. He stared at her, watching the steely, stormy grays of her eyes, unsure of what to say or do.

“Th-thank you,” he whispered.

She fluttered her gaze away suddenly and lifted herself off of him. Her body left a radiating warmth everywhere across him she had touched, and now the cold of the desert rushed over him uninvitingly. She reached her hand down, and he grabbed it as he hoisted himself back up to his feet. Dizziness tried to swim over him again, and before he fell forward, Aura was underneath his arm and holding him upright.

“You okay?”

“I might have a concussion,” he mumbled. He tenderly patted his side. “And uh, maybe a broken rib.”

“We’ll take care of that when we find somewhere safe. But we can’t linger here.”

He nodded. She forced him to lean against her for stability, and he hated to have her support any of his weight, but it felt comforting knowing she was a lot stronger than he gave her credit for. She led him along the length of the cliff, her hand firmly grasped around his torso. When they passed the cliff, he caught the flickering orange on the horizon, and he nearly doubled over.

The Hammerhead garage was aflame, along with one Imperial airship. The suffocating smell of burning rubber stung his eyes.

Aura tugged at him. “C’mon,” she muttered.

“But…Noct…where is…?”

“We have to go, Prompto. Before they find us.”

Stiffly, he remained silent. They walked away from the flaming garage, and he hoped the fires would not the reach the gas tanks underneath. Being pulled away from a place once so familiar was a whirlwind of emotions. In a flash, all their experiences from the past several months tumbled through his head. Takka and Dave. The hunts. Cid and Cindy. The Regalia. Relaxing at the caravan. His friends.

Would they ever be able to return home to Insomnia?

He closed his eyes, pushing away the thoughts. He leaned on Aura, trying hard to not slump against the broken rib in his side.

“W-what was that?” he muttered. “Back there with the daemon?”

She hesitated. “It couldn’t see us.”

“That’s a terrible lie. You lie terribly.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her smirk. “Stop worrying about that. We need to worry about you right now.”

“Yeah, but that…I don’t even know what that was!”

“Like I said, it couldn’t see us.”

He forced himself back, halting her in her steps. She tried to pull him forward, but he refused, standing as upright as he could.

“What are you doing?” she asked as she scrunched her forehead.

He swallowed, nervous suddenly. “Why did you kiss me?”

She laughed lightly. “ _That’s_ what you’re concerned with? Not the Red Giant, or your concussion, or your friends…?”

“Yeah, I care about those things, too, but I want to know.” He tried to straighten himself off his rib, succeeding only slightly. “Why did you kiss me?”

“I asked you to trust me. This isn’t trusting me.” She grabbed for his arm and pulled it back over her shoulders, gripping him around the torso once again. “I’ll have an answer for you later, okay?”

He tried to straighten himself off his rib again, feeling disorientation flood his vision, and then everything blurred. He fell backward onto the ground in a slump, his eyes falling up to stare at the vast, scarcely starry void.

“Fuuuuck,” he groaned, feeling nauseated.

Aura’s face hovered over his, blocking out the clouded stars. “Are you going to make me carry you?”

“No. Don’t. That’s…weird.”

“Then get up. I don’t think your adorable masculinity could handle me picking you up.”

He struggled upright to a sitting position and reached his arm out, feeling around the air for some support from her. She grabbed his forearm and yanked him up to his feet. His head nearly snatched on his neck.

“Easy with me—I almost died!”

“This is not what I signed up for,” she mumbled, wrapping firmly around his torso a third time. “And I swear to Etro, if you let go of me again, I’m knocking you out and throwing you over my shoulder.”

Prompto allowed her to support him and lead him away from Hammerhead. They sidestepped boulders and dry brush, and he stumbled over his own two left feet more often than not. He could hardly see the ground in front of him much less judge how far away it lay. She asked if he had a potion, to which he could only shake his head. He glanced up, and realized for the first they were trudging through the middle of the desert.

He whipped his head around. They were surrounded by sand and nature. Charred mountains sat like jagged teeth all around them. Hammerhead’s fire was a lit matchhead in the wide expanse, barely visible. He searched for some other light or indication of life before his breath shorted. A coldness ran through him, numbing his hands and feet.

“Wh-where are we? Where’re…the others? What’s…what’s going…” He failed to complete his thoughts.

“Prompto, stop it. We can’t go back. They’ll kill us.”

He tried to unwrap himself from her, but her grip failed to yield.

“I-I have to go back. I have to help Noct!”

The cold settled into his core, and inky blotches dotted the edge of his vision.

She released him and grabbed the sides of his face. His chest compressed into a small, heavy hole housing nothing. He couldn’t feel his own heartbeat anymore.

“Breathe. You have to breathe,” she whispered.

“Daemons! Out here! There’s…they—”

“Breathe with me. Inhale…”

But he disengaged from listening, and fell back out of her grasp. The stars twirled in circular motions, pinwheeling in and out of the cloud cover.

Nothing registered. His jaw felt like a decaying piece of flesh on his face. He fell forward and vomited up the remains of his seafood dinner into the sand between his hands. Aura firmly patted between his shoulder blades, waiting for him to be done. He wiped what remained from his lips with the mound of his thumb. And then, feeling overwhelmed and psychologically weakened, he began to cry soundlessly. The tears burned where they touched, making him aware of the lacerations across his cheeks. He smeared one with the back of his hand, and it came back dark red.

Her strong hands pulled him up by his shoulders. Her eyes met his, the stormy gray instantly calming him when he looked into them.

“Prompto, you need to trust me. Just a bit longer. Please.”

“I-I’m…a little confused. I don’t know what’s going on, Aura,” he mumbled through tears. “I-I don’t know why we’re out here, or anything…and I…Noct…”

“You have a concussion. These emotions are normal. And you’re hyperventilating. So we’re going to breathe together, all right?” She cupped her hands around his, and it became the only thing he could feel anymore.

On her command, he synchronized himself with her breathing, inhaling when she did, exhaling when she did. For reasons he couldn’t explain, it came naturally to fall in synch with her. While he realized how easy it was, the numbness in his body disappeared, and his nerves tingled back to life. Her hands, infused with warmth rivaling the fires of the Infernian, brought him immense comfort. It caused him to long for a home that never existed.

When his breathing normalized, and he trusted her once again to carry him, he didn’t put up near the fuss he had the first few times. For a stranger bordering on acquaintance, Aura bestowed great patience on him. She led him through the Leiden desert and into the Weaverwilds. They walked for several hours, or several days. Prompto couldn’t judge time anymore. Eventually, glowing glyphs graced the ground in front of him, and he realized she had brought him to a campsite.

Carefully, she lowered him to a sitting position. “I know how much you dislike the darkness, but you’re going to have to be okay with it tonight.”

He whimpered and put his head between his knees. “Oh man, why is everything spinning?”

“Lift your head.”

He did. She knelt between his legs, then grabbed the light from Prompto’s vest jacket and shined it into his eyes. The brilliant glare intensified a pain inside his skull he was unaware of until now.

“Your pupils aren’t dilated, so you should be safe to sleep.” She turned the light off and hooked it back onto his jacket. “You need to rest.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, exasperated. “Won’t that kill me?”

“That’s a myth. Sleeping helps your brain to heal.”

“But I’m too wired to sleep.”

“You need to try. Lay back.”

She helped him lower to the ground on his back. The packed earth felt terrible underneath his aching body.

“Talk to me. Tell me about your favorite hobby.”

“Is this a concussion thing?” he asked as he stared at the blanketing clouds above them, trying to find shapes in their forms.

“It can be a concussion thing, or it can be a friendly thing.”

“Okay.” He grinned. “Easy. Photography.”

“Tell me about it.” She disappeared out of sight.

“Aw, man, I don’t know. I just love taking pictures. I always have. I used to love taking them of animals. You know, mostly cats and dogs around Insomnia. Other people’s pets. But I gradually moved on to locations, then people. The candid ones are my favorites.”

He twisted his head up to look for her, just as she slid her tanktop up and over her head, revealing ample curves pressed into a black bra.

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself before immediately shooting his eyes away.

She didn’t notice him. “Is that it? Tell me more about photography.”

His mouth dried. “Uh, well, there’s…not a lot to tell. You shoot pictures.”

“Why do you take them?”

He shrugged, trying to not think about the litheness of her body or slopes of her breasts. Not when there were more important things to think about. Where his friends were, for one. Or if they escaped the Imperials. But he knew thinking about them would lead him down dark, morbid paths. 

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I used to take photos because it was easy. I could focus on other people, their moments and their smiles. I wasn’t taking them of myself, so I was never the focus. It’s never about the guy behind the camera.”

From behind him, he felt the slight pressure of her hands lifting his head up. He kept his eyes down, obliged to her request and lifted his head slightly. His heart warmed when he felt her place her folded up tanktop underneath his head.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“A sad way to look at taking photos.”

“N-no. Don’t think that. I just…get that way sometimes.” He tried to grin, but couldn’t. He found he simply couldn’t plaster on his rehearsed smile for her, and he didn’t understand why.

“I think you’re okay to sleep. You seem very coherent.”

“Good to know.”

The fabric of her top still resonated with her body warmth. It felt good against his pained headache.

She moved to lay beside him, adjusting so her arm rest underneath her head. He turned to look at her, ordering himself to not glance down. The soft blue light from a glyph cast its radiance across her face and hair, shining her skinned shoulder violet in color. She was a whirl of shadows, comforting and mysterious. Her necklaces lay in a pile underneath her chin. Her modesty was still so casual, even now. Perhaps she hadn’t mocked him in Hammerhead after all.

“C-can I ask you something?” he stammered.

“Shoot.”

“Are you always like this? With men, specifically?”

“You mean, taking off my clothes.”

His face flustered hot instantly.

“It’s just a body. A physical shell. It’s not a sexual thing until you make it so.” She smiled small, almost reassuringly. “I’m sorry if I make you uncomfortable. I sometimes don’t think about those things.”

“It’s just that…I’ve never met a girl who was open about her body like that.”

“They’re around. We’re not uncommon.”

He smiled. “I hope not. I like to think it’s just a _you_ thing.”

Though he could have misread her emotions, what looked like the tiniest of blushes surfaced up underneath her sprinkling of freckles. She didn’t look like the kind of girl who blushed, so he chalked it up to his own disorientation in the darkness.

“You need to sleep,” she said simply.

“But…I don’t want to. I want to talk.”

“You’re concussed. Believe it or not, your brain needs rest.”

He nodded at her skinned shoulder. “Are you okay? Really?” 

“Yes. Really.”

He opened his mouth to ask her about Lestallum, or about Hammerhead two weeks prior. Ask her about any instance where she had seemingly healed overnight. But he digressed, and closed his mouth, finding the conversation difficult to start.

The action didn’t slip by her. “I know what you’re thinking. Maybe I’ll tell you someday.”

His heart thudded into his throat. “Why not now?”

She smirked, then gave him a wink. “Let’s just start at the beginning first.”

“We’ve survived death together, like, a couple times. I think—and I may be wrong—but I think we’re past the beginning. You can give me a little credit, right?” He hadn’t the faintest idea where this newfound ease originated. Normally his shyness amplified around girls. But this felt beyond different. This felt familiar. Comfortable.

“Get some sleep, Sunshine,” she whispered, patting his shoulder. “I’ll wake you in a little bit to check on you.”

He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly how very tired he was. The air pressed down against him, weighing him into the packed earth. He blinked, pulling his eyes open a final time.

“Why do you call me that?” he mumbled.

But she didn’t answer. She kept quiet and waited for him to close his eyes again, and he drifted off into the realm of dreams.

* * * * *

_Prompto pressed his tired face against the glass wall, waiting for her. The other nine boys in their other narrow chambers cried. Some remained silent. They knew how much it hurt every time. It was never a day they anticipated with happiness. Except Prompto._

_Ten girls were ushered in, all blonde and pale, and deposited into numbered glass chambers by technicians in white suits. He recognized the last girl at the back of the line. One technician led her to the chamber next to Prompto’s. When the glass door hissed closed behind her, the girl immediately ran to their corner and dropped down beside Prompto, pressing her hand against the glass. He pressed his hand against hers, drawing from her a toothy smile._

_“Hi again,” she said._

_“Hi,” he replied. “I missed you.”_

_Her eyes glinted. “I missed you, too.”_

_They sat momentarily, pressing their foreheads to one another’s against the glass wall, before she lifted her face._

_“I want to try something new this time,” she said in a rush._

_His heart beat wildly. “Do you think it will help?”_

Warm fingers pressed against his cold jawline, stirring Prompto awake from an unstable dream. He groaned, blinking heavily.

“What was the last thing you photographed?” Aura softly asked.

He despaired. “Overlooking Lestallum after the invasion.”

“Okay. Just checking.” Then said nothing more.

His eyes glued shut, staving off the throbbing ache in the back of his skull, and he slipped into the better parts of his worst memories.

_“If you could name yourself, and pick any name,” the girl said, smiling, “what would it be?”_

_“Something strong! Or brave!” Prompto exclaimed. “No, no—fast! I want to be fast. So I can run away and no one would catch me because I would be so fast!”_

_“Yes!” she said, picking at the bandage in the bend of her elbow. “But how would I catch you? You can’t be fast and me not be fast, too.”_

_“Well, what about you? You can be fast like me.”_

_“No, I want my name to mean something else, like ‘hope’ or ‘freedom’.”_

_“What about Hope?” he suggested, grinning._

_She frowned and shook her head. “Nah, that doesn’t sound like a real name.”_

“Coherency check,” Aura whispered, fluttering the hair around his ear.

Prompto stirred from sleep. Her breath against his skin sent his blood rushing to southern regions, causing his own breathing to hitch.

“How old were you when you started taking photos?”

His heart became a stone in his chest. He desired to pick at the leather wristbands on his arm, but didn’t. Instead, he inhaled deep, and answered, “Eight.”

“Do you remember anything special about being eight?”

“I-I…well…”

_The year I fucking hated myself._

Aura gripped his chin and turned it toward her. He knew she checked for vitals due to his lack of answer, but all he wanted was to cup her neck and bring her mouth down to his.

“Hey, you okay?”

He swallowed. “Give me a different question. Eight was…hard.”

“Hm, okay. How about, what was your—“

“No, I wanna ask,” he interrupted. “What’s _your_ favorite pastime?”

“It does me no good to talk about myself. I need to know you’re cognitively functioning.”

“Now you sound like Iggy. Favorite pastime. It’s only fair.”

She smirked. “Killing stuff.”

“Why do you lie so much? Is lying your favorite thing on Eos to do?” He gasped. “Is _lying_ your favorite pastime?”

“No, I just do it particularly well and with ease.”

“We can’t build a relationship on lies. It’s unhealthy.”

“I hate to say it,” she answered, “but you’ll get nothing out of me.”

He lifted a hand to his forehead and rubbed along the crown of his brow, ignoring its pain to steal just a few more words with Aura. “Please? I wanna know.”

“Bedtime, Sunshine.” And like that, she ceased talking.

After a moment of protesting, and yielding nothing from her, his head became heavy again, and his eyelids pulled shut. Dream distorted reality in a maddening fluctuation. Eventually dreams took control and sucked him down into their rotting pit, and he was dead asleep again. He drifted off into another memory. 

_“We’re going to look at each other,” the girl suggested._

_“Why?” Prompto asked._

_“Because when we see each other, we’re happy. It makes the pain go away. It never hurts as bad when I’m thinking of you.”_

_“Okay.”_

_“But there’s a rule. You can’t look worried. Or scared. Or sad. It makes it worse. Look like, we’re not here. We’re someplace else.”_

_A technician rattled off the girl’s identification number in the outer laboratory._

_“That’s confusing,” he said. “I don’t know anywhere else.”_

_“Pretend like, we’re holding hands for the first time.” Her voice became laced with fear, shaking suddenly. She tensed her hand against the glass._

_“But then…I would be happy. Is happy okay?”_

_The technician opened her glass door._

A distant sobbing tore his heart in half. Prompto partially woke, unsure if he still dreamed or the real world called out to him. The sobbing hurt him, somersaulted his stomach, and caused a darkness to crawl through his bones.

He blinked awake, remembering who and where he was. He was outside. The heavy cloud cover remained, destroying all hope of moonlight or starlight. The world lay dark around him. Underneath his stiff body, the ground felt cold and coarse. His fingers grazed the corners of his eyes. No, he wasn’t crying. He turned his head, feeling the softness of fabric beneath his hair. Aura’s tanktop. His eyelids fluttered, and faraway, at the edge of the campsite, lay a still Aura facing away from him. Her dark hair waterfalled down the back of her head to the dirt as she slept in a fetal position. A shadow within the shadows.

Prompto prepared to pull himself up when a he heard a despairing sob. He stilled. Then he noticed the subtle shaking in Aura’s shoulders. She was awake, and crying.

He wanted to say something. He wanted to walk over to where she lay, at the far edge, and lay beside her. He wanted to wrap her up in his arms. But the thoughts all felt strange, as she was still barely an acquaintance to him. But her sobs darkened a part of his heart, and dragged colder memories out he wished he never remembered again. Prompto knew what it felt like to cry alone at night, wishing not to wake others.

She wasn’t alone. But instead of telling her that, he reached out his arm toward her, palm up, in the only way he knew how to reassure her. He let her be for now. Before long, her sobbing ceased, and he drifted back off to sleep.

_Her sweet, little face filled his memories. Contorted, saddened. Tears streamed down the sides of her cheeks, falling into the shell of her ear and the blonde hair at her temples. She tried to look at him, but couldn’t. The pain coursed through her, and Prompto could feel it. He did his best to hold her gaze, thinking of holding her hand for the first time._

_The essence of every daemonic horror concentrated in one tiny vial. Slipping down through a tiny needle, bleeding into her tiny arm._

_Barely seven years old, and already knowing all the sadness of the world._

_Would they remember each other when they became monsters?_

* * * * *

Aura woke Prompto an hour before dawn fully emerged, insisting the two of them needed to move before daylight revealed them to the Imperials. Though his concussion needed more time to heal, the dizziness had disappeared, along with the nausea, and he was able to stand without requiring her assistance.

The cloud cover blanketing the night sky had dissipated by morning. They navigated by starlight and headed northwest. Aura remained as the strength behind the two of them as Prompto braced himself against her.

While stumbling through the still dark, his hand over her shoulders came to brush up against her skinned one. He flinched away, knowing how much the grazing of fingers would have hurt her, but when his fingertips fell back from smooth, dry skin, he didn’t have to ask to know the wound was no longer there.

Instinctively, he tried to straighten, only to realize he no longer needed to straighten. His rib felt somewhat normal, if a smidgen sore. Ignis’ words when he had awoke the previous night repeated in his head: Prompto and Aura both should have died in Lestallum. And the only thing Prompto remembered had been holding her hand. His stomach fluttered with nerves. He had no explanation for anything extraordinary going on, and Aura did not freely give out answers. He glanced down at his free arm to see the grenade shrapnel lacerations were now mere lines in his skin. He swallowed, and ignored all of it for the time being.

They traveled for several hours far from the road, walking through the dawn and encountering no daemons on their way. He kept his eyes to the sky, waiting for an Imperial airship to drop on them like the one had at Hammerhead, but none came. Daybreak was beautiful as it spilled across the vastness of untouched sand. Before the border between Leide and Duscae, Prompto realized he no longer needed any physical support from Aura to walk upright. He reluctantly released her, knowing the only reason for continuing to hold her was because he wanted to. Her small smile when he did so caused his ears and cheeks to burn.

He wanted to talk, but his heart stopped him when he remembered how she had cried when she thought he slept. He desired to know what caused such sorrow, and what he could do in the future to hinder it. But her crying made him realize how very far away he was from getting to know her. So instead of talking, they fell into a comfortable silence.

Before Leide ended and Duscae began, they climbed a small incline of stones away from the road with every intention of navigating around it. When they reached the top, sore and panting, Prompto noticed and narrowed his gaze at a campsite several hundred yards away within the rocks. The site was entirely absent from the road, and could only be seen from their higher position. Life surrounded a smoldering fire, braced in by a pitched tent and three collapsible chairs. 

And for the first time in a long time, Prompto sobbed in happiness.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case some of you haven’t noticed, I changed a few of the tags. One of the more notable tags I removed was the Noctis/Stella relationship. If some of you were reading hoping to eventually reach that point, I apologize! Their story got a little rogue for me and puzzle pieces weren’t fitting properly. I realized that for a relationship that profound, I needed to separate it from Prompto/Aura’s story. If you were looking forward to it, don’t worry. More than likely I will be uploading a longer, fuller version of their relationship, which would essentially be Versus XIII headcanon, at a later date.

Even the avian Zu’s flight could not match the flight of Prompto’s boots as all fatigue disappeared from him, and he flew across the rocks toward the new campsite. His ankles threatened to give out several times against the jutting stones, but he didn’t falter. He yelled out their names, unable to contain any of his joy.

Noctis, crouching near the campfire, sprang to his feet and ran toward him. Prompto crashed into him at the edge of the campsite, sobbing and gripping his friend hard.

“I-I couldn’t…I couldn’t summon my weapons, man!” Prompto cried. “I-I thought they had…that you had…”

Noctis let him ramble, as he often did when Prompto couldn’t find his words or when his one-sided conversations spilled on for far too long.

“H-Hammerhead’s gone! We ran for the desert, but when I couldn’t summon my weapons…” He sniffled and pulled away, holding Noctis by the shoulders. “Shit, Buddy, don’t do that to me! If you’re going to die, at least let me know beforehand!”

Noctis cocked an eyebrow. “If I plan on dying, I think I’d have to let Iggy know first so he can plan the funeral arrangements.”

“Don’t sully my name with your morbid thoughts, Noct,” Ignis chided behind him. The man looked tired and disheveled, with the cuffs of his sleeves rolled and the top few buttons of his shirt undone. A dark red blotch stained his shirt and part of his exposed collarbone. “I don’t plan on planning anyone’s funeral.”

“Are you okay?” Noctis asked. The darkened hollows beneath Noctis’ eyes indicated he had not slept at all the night before. His black shirt was torn, and his jacket was missing.

“Dude, barely! I survived, like, three, four explosions? I can’t even remember anymore. I got a concussion, and a broken rib, and a…” He released Noctis for a moment to touch his skinned cheek, which to no surprise, was not skinned anymore. “…well, it’s gone now. But it was there. I swear.”

“You endured all that? And you ran here?”

Prompto grinned lopsided, realizing he no longer felt any ache in his rib or vertigo from the concussion. “Uh, yeah. I guess I did.”

“What, nothing for me?” Gladiolus said, emerging from the tent. He looked equally exhausted, with sweat and dirt staining his clothes and skin. He strode toward Prompto grinning, when he glanced over Prompto’s shoulder. Prompto turned to see Aura walking up to the campsite.

For someone so guarded with his emotions, it surprised everyone when Noctis nudged Prompto’s hands from his shoulders, approached Aura, and pulled her into a fierce and sudden hug. She appeared stunned before her muscles relaxed and she gently placed her open hands against his back.

“I don’t know what you did, but thank you,” Noctis mumbled against her shoulder, loud enough for Prompto to hear.

Aura glanced up at Prompto over Noctis’ shoulder, then smiled. “You’re welcome.”

When Noctis released her, Ignis approached her and extended his hand. She shook it firm. “Thank you, Aura, for tending to our dear Prompto.” He released her hand. “If you’re still willing and wanting, as we previously discussed, I would wholly enjoy your company with us to Tenebrae.”

“Only if I am no bother to you all,” she said.

“You’re the opposite of a bother,” Noctis assured. “I had my doubts at first, but seeing you in action and knowing you’ve saved Prompto a couple of times erases those doubts.”

“You have a certain skill set we strategically could use in combat,” Ignis added. “Especially if the Imperials have taken over the Lucian countryside.”

She smiled a half-smile. “Then of course, I would be appreciative if I could join you.”

Though Prompto remembered their conversation before driving to Insomnia, the assurance that Aura would join them to Tenebrae still fluttered his insides as if it were new information. Every moment he would be given to spend with her were moments he didn’t want to waste.

“Hey, uh, good to see you again, Aura,” Gladio said, approaching her as well. “If you don’t mind, I have to talk to you. Can we…?” He jerked his thumb out toward the perimeter of the campsite.

“Of course,” she said.

He nodded, and then gestured for her to follow him. She flashed Prompto a gentle smile, her eyes glinting in the morning light, and Prompto felt his heart melt. He barely knew her and he became putty every time she so much as glanced at him. She followed Gladio out a ways from the campsite. They sat on two rocks facing the camp, out of earshot.

“You must be hungry, Prompto,” Ignis said. “I was just in the process of preparing breakfast.”

“Famished!” He dropped on his butt near the fire, thankful for something that felt familiar. “I threw up your last meal, so technically I haven’t eaten in, what, two days?”

“I can tell. The baby fat’s shrinking away finally,” Noctis mumbled as he dropped beside him.

Prompto punched him in the shoulder. “Not fat, dude.”

“Not anymore, at least.”

“Hey, I worked hard to lose that weight. Be nice.”

Noctis chuckled before his voice dropped. “So…what happened, Prom? After Aura fell from the car.” His gaze drifted down to the low-burning fire. “Which I’m sorry about, by the way.”

“Apologize to her, not me. But I don’t think she holds it against you.”

“But after that?”

Prompto sighed, absent-mindedly picking at the edge of his leather wristband. “I-I dunno, dude. It was weird. All of it. The Imperials were dropping grenades on us. I think one of the explosions threw me into the desert. And then, this Red Giant appeared, and…” He paused, lingering on the kiss Aura forced on him. A heat flushed his face, and he tried to force it away. “…we…we escaped it, and stayed at a campsite to rest my concussion. I was in and out of it. And my injuries, just, went away.”

“Overnight?”

“Yeah, man. Like they never existed.” Prompto glanced down at his arms, and saw the skin there unmarked and clean. The lacerations had also healed since he last saw them. He turned up to Noctis. “Can you explain it? I mean, is there some sort of magic something-or-another out there that does this? Maybe the Crystal, or even the Astrals?”

“Prom, I’ve been racking my brain ever since yesterday when she emerged from the tent. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

“Specs?” Prompto asked.

“I hate to disappoint you as well, Prompto,” Ignis said as he sautéed peppers and shredded chicken across a pan, “but I can recall nothing.”

He hummed in thought before shooting his gaze up over the fire at Gladio and Aura sitting in the rocks. It appeared as if Gladio did most of the talking, to which Aura gave one-worded responses and nods of her head.

“What about you guys?” he asked. “What happened when I jumped from the car?”

This time, it was Noctis’ turn to sigh. “We couldn’t get to you. We tried, but there were too many Imperials for just the three of us. I thought we stood a chance when I warped inside one of their airships and killed a grenadier. He practically self-destructed an entire ship. But another ship came, and they dropped mech after mech on us. Veles-BIS, I think is what Iggy called them. Short of killing ourselves, we had to run for it off-road.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, Prompto.”

Prompto’s chest tightened, but he ignored it. “Hey, Buddy, I understand. Really.”

“We really, really tried.”

His chest tightened even more. He sported his plastered smile and slugged his friend playfully. “Yeah, you tried. That’s all I care about. So don’t worry about it. I’m alive, aren’t I?”

Noctis glanced up through the black mats of his unkempt hair. “Yeah, you are. Thank the Gods.”

“Well, not the Gods, but I’m sure they’ll feel smug about it, regardless.”

“Thank _her_ , then.” 

Prompto couldn’t keep his eyes from snapping back up at Aura. She could have passed for an Amicitia, with her tanned complexion, sharp edges, and thick, dark hair next to Gladio. He watched them for a second before Gladio indicated toward Prompto. As Gladio talked, Aura glanced up and met Prompto’s stare across the fire. They were talking about him. Embarrassed, he dropped his gaze away.

To remove them from his thoughts, he quickly pulled out his camera from his back pocket to check its condition. Seeing it still undamaged, he pressed the power button. The screen blipped up with no problem, though it had a low battery. “I have to write a thoughtful letter to the people who make this camera. Quality product, right here. It can survive grenades and everything.”

“I am not one bit surprised it managed to survive with you,” Noctis chuckled.

“To commemorate survival and grenade explosions.” He stretched the camera out in front of them and slung his free arm around Noctis’ neck. Noctis flashed the camera a smug scowl—his usual staple expression for most selfies Prompto took with him. When he snapped the photo, he pulled it back to him and scrolled through the gallery to the previous photo and handed it to Noctis.

“Wow,” Noctis mumbled when he took the camera. “That’s a hard one to swallow.”

It was the photo of Lestallum beyond the Disc of Cauthess in morning light. The photo managed to capture the other spires of smoke, along with several airships in the surrounding sky.

“If we get back to Insomnia after all this, this photo would be published. You’d be a famous photojournalist then, Prom.”

“Thanks, man. I like to think of my future being stuffy-shirted and filled with long-winded answers involving ‘my method’ and ‘the process’.” He popped his lips. “Think I’ll start wearing glasses I don’t need so I can take them off thoughtfully.”

“Don’t forget to chew on the earpiece and stare wistfully into space,” Ignis added.

“He would know,” Noctis said. “Care to demonstrate for us, Specs?”

Smirking, Ignis pulled his glasses off, stuck the earpiece between his teeth, and stared out into the distance, releasing chuckles from the both of them by the fire.

“All right, I can’t see. I need these back,” Ignis said as he slid his glasses back on.

“On second thought,” Prompto said, shaking his head, “maybe I won’t do it. Having them when I was a kid was bad enough.”

“You were such a nerd,” Noctis said. “Still a nerd, with or without glasses.”

“Pots shouldn’t call kettles black, Noct,” Ignis said underneath a smile.

“What was that?”

“I said, breakfast is ready.”

Ignis shoveled contents from a frying pan onto two plates and walked them over to Prompto and Noctis. Roti flatbreads with a pile of egg, chicken, and pepper filling. He then returned to his stove and portioned out the rest onto three more plates.

Gladio and Aura, noticing breakfast being served, stood from the rocks and returned to camp. Prompto hiked an eyebrow when he saw Gladio extend his hand for her as she stepped down from a particularly large rock. Though she didn’t appear as if she needed his assistance, she took it nonetheless. When they returned to camp, Gladio grabbed two plates and handed her one.

“Oh, you guys don’t have to feed me,” she said. “I can make something myself.”

“Prompto’s alive because of you,” Gladio said. “We talked about this. You’re one of us now.”

She smiled before taking the plate. “Thank you.”

Prompto hoped, at the very least, Gladio offered a semblance of an apology to Aura about considering leaving her behind. Otherwise, his words of solidarity would mean nothing. And though he wanted to know, Prompto was not going to pry into their private conversation.

To his delight, Aura sat on the ground beside Prompto, not too near, not too far. He tore off a piece of roti and chewed on it slowly. Though he felt no pain or disorientation, he didn’t want to scarf food onto a stomach that may not be completely healed.

“You feeling okay?” she asked him.

He nodded, swallowing his bite. “I feel pretty amazing to be honest. What about you?”

“I’m good.”

His nerves fluttered. He didn’t know if she purposefully kept answers vague because she didn’t want him to get to know her, or because other persons sat around the fire within listening range.

They ate in idle chit-chat, talking about the delicious food and the weather forecast, when the distant hum of an engine forced them to glance skyward. Two Imperial airships, black as soot, flew across the sky toward Insomnia. The campsite was not entirely invisible from the sky, but the ships didn’t slow their progress, and passed on by.

“We shouldn’t linger,” Ignis said when the ships disappeared. “More will be coming if they plan to seize the city.”

Everyone silently agreed, and when they mopped up the last of their breakfasts, they all helped to quickly dismantle the campsite. They had less to carry, as all of Prompto’s belongings, including the fourth chair, had been left in the Regalia. He didn’t try to take it personally, but the idea still stung him.

Ignis led the way to the hidden vehicle. It was considerably farther from the campsite than the last time, as they had to traverse the rocky landscape and stony hills back toward the road. Gladio hovered near the back, helping to guide Aura across the rocks even though she didn’t need his assistance. Prompto couldn’t help shoot glances backward at the two of them. Gladio seemed friendlier and more open, but Aura still remained Aura, smiling politely and giving indistinct responses. He didn’t know if he should feel pleased she didn’t sway toward Gladio, or saddened because she treated Gladio like she treated Prompto—with her arm fully extended between them.

_She’s still a stranger who barely knows you._

_Yeah, a stranger who saved your life. A stranger who healed you._

He pulled his gaze back around to his footfall, pushing thoughts away and failing miserably.

_A stranger who kissed you._

_Nothing special._

He sighed, stepping down from a jagged rock and nearly slipping on a smoother one beneath it.

_Look at her. She’s fucking amazing, and you’re just…_

He couldn’t even finish his own thought.

When they reached solid ground, Ignis led them to a dilapidated shed back from the road. The small building was an eyesore, falling apart and blending with its beige environment. The Regalia sat inside it, hidden partially behind a detached wall.

“I am truly impressed by your ability to hide vehicles, Iggy,” Prompto said, crossing his arms. “Real GTA like. Worries me some.”

“It _was_ in the job description,” Ignis replied, smirking, as he shifted the wall to the side. “Just finally glad I could apply it somewhere.”

“Ah, yes. Teaching studies, cleaning apartments, cooking food, stealing cars…the usual.”

The shed was compact, and none of them could sidle through to the seats. When the trunk was packed, Ignis crawled over the top of the Regalia to slide into the driver’s seat. He slowly backed out, and they piled into the vehicle. In the daylight, Prompto noticed several bloodstains in the backseat he had not noticed the night before. His skin crawled when he realized it was his and Aura’s blood, the night the others had saved them from Lestallum. He sat on top of one stain, wondering if it was his blood, or Aura’s.

Like before, she wedged herself between Prompto and Noctis. Her thigh brushed his, and a heat rose in his flesh to the surface of his skin to meet hers. Every time she touched him, she left fire in her wake. He wondered unhappily if she thought his skin felt cold in comparison.

When Ignis pulled the Regalia out onto the road, heading toward Duscae, he warned everyone to keep their eyes peeled. They passed a familiar pit stop, turning left, and drove on into the Duscae countryside. Prompto watched as a faraway Catoblepas dipped its spade-like head into Neeglyss Pond and stretched out with a mouthful of algae greens.

“If you don’t mind, I need to grab something before we head to Cape Shawe,” Aura said.

“We can’t really afford to make any stops unless we have to,” Ignis replied. “Especially any social interactions. I don’t mean to be rude. That’s just the state of the situation we’re in right now.”

Prompto saw her smile wryly out of the corner of his eye. “I understand that,” she said, “but I lost my belongings in Lestallum, including my truck, and I’m near certain you don’t have any feminine products in that trunk of yours.”

Ignis blushed ten shades of crimson before he cleared his throat.

“I have a bug-out bag hidden about a mile up ahead. I’m only asking if I could hop out and grab it.”

“Oh. Of course,” he stammered. “My apologies.”

In the passenger seat, Gladio stifled a snort against his knuckles.

Ignis drove about another mile in silence, approaching the Nebulawood and gliding through tree shadows stretched across the road. The foliage still retained some of their morning dew, glistening every green thing to life.

After a minute, Aura leaned forward. “Stop here,” she said, gripping the headrest.

Ignis obliged, slowing to a stop near the guardrail. “I’m going to keep it running.”

“It’ll only take a second.”

“Mind if I join you?” Prompto asked as he opened his door and hopped out.

She slid across the seat and hopped out beside him. “It’s not necessary.”

“Um, I beg to differ. Niflheim has invaded Lucis. Preeeetty sure you don’t need to be alone.”

One eyebrow climbed slightly. “If you insist.”

Prompto shut the door and followed her, ignoring the looks from the other three in the Regalia. He vaulted over the edge of the guardrail as she did and trudged uphill into the treeline. He followed her a good way from the road until she reached a mound of vertical stones.

“Look for a sun symbol,” she said.

“Uh, okay. A sun.” Prompto stooped low and dug around in the stones, struggling to find what she deemed a sun symbol. “Sun, sun, sun, sun…”

She mumbled a few curse words under her breath before continuing to search. “I buried it about a year or so ago. I haven’t checked on it since.”

He stole a glance at her from underneath his eyebrows as he pushed a stone over.

“Stop that,” she said.

“S-stop what?”

“Stop doing that. What you’re doing.”

“Looking for a sun symbol?”

Aura paused turning over stones and bore her gray eyes at Prompto. “Staring at me.”

He scoffed. “No one’s staring. Paranoid much?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Hey, is this it?” Prompto asked. A chalky, gray scrawl of a sun marked the underside of rough rock. Several pill bugs scurried across it.

“That’s it.” She grabbed a flat rock and began to dig in the loose earth. It took only a second before she reached a plastic bag. She pulled the bag out, shaking it loose of dirt, and opened it to pull out a black canvas bag.

“So, are you really homeless?”

She opened the bag and checked its contents. “Yeah, I am.”

He watched as she pulled several pieces of clothes out to check them, including survival items like a standard first aid kit and a water filter. Something about watching her rifle through what few belongings she possessed was heartbreaking. If she had no home, he wondered if it meant she also had no family. Suddenly him clinging to her dog tag after her injuries seemed more meaningful.

“All right, we can head back,” she said as she slung her bag over one arm.

Before they could even pick themselves up, two sounds overlapped each other down at the road: the roaring of an airship engine, and the erratic honking of the Regalia’s horn.

Prompto and Aura booked it back down the hill, weaving through the trees. Through the canopy of leaves, Prompto could see the black shadow of a ship lowering from the sky. He emerged from behind a final tree, and he could see the Regalia in the road, the other three throwing the doors open and jumping out.

“Imperials, above us!” Prompto called out. 

The other three materialized their weapons, and his Rebellion pixilated into his open hand as he vaulted over the guardrail and landed on the road beside them. He flicked bullets into the chamber, readying himself as the ship bottomed out and opened. At least twenty Imperial soldiers stood, stoic and ready, at the rim of the opening. Behind them, something far more fierce and mechanical waited.

“Arm yourselves!” Gladiolus shouted, tightening his grip on his greatsword.

The soldiers dropped sporadically into the open air. Prompto pulled his gun up, ready for the First Shot.

In the blink of an eye, two shining silver discs cut through the scene in front of him. The dropping soldiers became pieces in nanoseconds, crumbling into limbs, heads, and dissected torsos and littering the road in front of them. Eight of the twenty soldiers were dead before they even landed from above. The discs buzzed back through, hit two more soldiers and flew to the left out of Prompto’s line of sight. 

Prompto wanted to hurl his breakfast.

The other three stood back, caught off guard. Even Gladio took a noticeable step backward away from the bloodbath in front of them. They accepted death every day, and always knew how hard it was to perform the deed, but to see the slaughter and dismemberment happen in a flash was overwhelming. 

They turned to the direction the chakrams flew. Aura’s hands shot out and grabbed each bleeding disc as they wheeled back to her. Blood freckled across the thighs of her hide pants. Her face blazed with something akin to fury when she noticed all four of the men staring at her.

“What are you doing?” she screamed at them.

Gladio and Ignis didn’t need another snap back into reality. They jumped for the last line of soldiers, followed by Noctis and his warp strike. Prompto, however, found concentrating harder than usual. He realigned the energy for his missed First Shot to prepare for Starshell, but the glittering chakrams flew across the field again, and his quickly beating heart fluttered in his chest. Another soldier down, and then another. Each time he led a shot, the soldier would be dead before he could pull the trigger. He never missed a shot in his entire fighting career, but the chakrams kept him from even having a chance to prove himself. When two soldiers remained, he dropped his hand and pointed his Rebellion at the road beneath his feet. He knew a frown soured his face, but he had a hard time trying to hide it. As he expected, all enemies fell without his help.

“Not quite finished here, Prompto,” Noctis shouted out to him with a nod upward.

_Another chance._

The mechanical monstrosity, a Veles-BIS, gyrated in the shadows of the warship before leaping out and dropping to the bloody ground. The pavement rumbled underneath its weight, sending tremors through Prompto’s boots. The Veles ascended to its full height, geared up its gun, and Prompto fired a Piercer. The bullet sailed through the air, made impact with the side panel of the Veles, and exploded like a small cannon within the hull of the machinery. Its sound ricocheted off the line of trees.

The Veles stumbled before taking a barrage of beatings from Ignis’ daggers, but they only made a small dent in the Veles’ energy fields. The machine flicked Ignis away with one swipe of an arm. Ignis flew and hit the guardrail. He dropped to his knees and clutched his ribs. Prompto fired a series of shots into a joint, weakening the machine’s arm. 

“Uh, Noct, we should probably think about backing down!” he suggested as he took a few steps back. He flicked a new batch of bullets into his gun. “It might be too strong for us.”

At that moment, one of Aura’s shining chakrams buzzed across again and slammed the joint Prompto had fired at. The arm dropped, useless yet still attached. She was a blur as she ran toward it, catching the disc as it flew back into her hand. Her foot found purchase in the crook of its leg, and she leapt high, dropping both discs down into the joint of the other arm. The smell of electric fire sizzled through the air as the arm short-circuited and fell to the ground with a crackling thud.

Without the use of the Veles’ arms, the machine became more of a chore than a threat as the five worked together to take it down. Bit by bit, metal panels shed and wires snapped until the Veles became a skeleton of a machine. Gladio pulled every bit of his remaining strength up into a final Dawnhammer, and the machine finally crashed down in defeat. When its terror transformed into an electric mess, Prompto dropped to the ground on his back. 

“Everyone alive? No one dead?” Noctis asked, panting.

“All fine here,” Gladio said, flicking away his greatsword into thin air.

“Iggy? Prom?”

“Present,” Prompto mumbled. He stared up at the sky, watching the clouds string together like snake spines. He was disappointed more than defeated or tired. Before he could process what he experienced, the light crunch of the pavement nearby caused him to turn his head. Aura stood over him, chakrams still dangling from her fingers.

“You always like this after a fight?” she said, breathing hard.

“What? Me? Nah,” he said, smiling. He propped himself up with his elbows. “Well, that depends on what you mean by, _like this_.”

“Discontented?”

“Oh. Hell no.”

“Did I steal your thunder?” she asked.

“No! Well, I _am_ usually the only mid to long-range distance fighter, but it’s cool.”

She smirked, then flicked her wrists up and dematerialized her chakrams mid-air.

“So how do you do that, by the way?”

“Do what? Sheath my weapons?”

He indicated her gloves. “Yeah, you summoned them.”

“Yeah?”

He frowned. “That’s the King’s magic. We’re able to do it because of Noct. How in Eos do you do it?”

She chewed on the corner of her lip, hesitating. Then she pulled one glove off, flipped it inside out, and revealed the palm. Printed into the surface of the rawhide lay a glowing red glyph.

“Is that legal?” he asked. “I mean, can you do that?”

“If it’s legal or not, I don’t know, but I did it anyway.”

“That’s…Niflheim’s technology. Magitek.”

She gave a slow nod. “Yeah. It is.”

“How did you get it?”

“It’s a secret.”

“You have a lot of those.”

“Now what kind of relationship would this be if I didn’t give you something to chase after? I have to be mysterious, right?”

His mouth dropped suddenly before he pulled it back up. “Mysterious, no. Complicated and withholding information to protect yourself, yes. Be that. I can work with that.”

Though he meant every bit of it as a joke, something fell in her facial features that made him regret even saying it. And he wasn’t sure why.

“Whoa, hey,” he said, quickly trying to reel it in. He stood, dusting his hands against his hips. “I’m sorry if I offended you. What I mean is, if you have secrets you’re scared to tell, I’m just saying I understand. I wasn’t trying to make light of your past or anything.”

But she waved it off nonchalantly. “Hey, it’s fine.”

“No, not really. If I hurt your feelings, please let me know.”

She shook her head. “No, you didn’t. Truth be told, everyone is hiding something. Some realities are darker than others, but no one is a clean slate.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” he said through a grimace.

“Don’t worry. I’m not hurt,” she said as she removed her other glove and slid them in her back pocket. “Takes a lot to hurt me.”

The corner of his mouth twitched when she said that. He didn’t like hearing that she was so accustomed to pain it became ordinary. His heart broke a little.

They stared at one another for a several seconds before he broke eye contact and a waved toward the other three. “I’m sure they’re waiting.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Soundlessly, they piled back into the car. Ignis had to be handed a potion before he could drive. Though Noctis insisted on taking the wheel to give him a break, Ignis declined. When the potion flourished over his skin and through his body, he reversed the Regalia down the road, then veered down around the guardrail to avoid the pile of flesh and metal they left behind. The Regalia climbed back up onto the road on the other side. No one said a word.

In the back seat, Prompto rubbed the tension from his brow and rest his head against the rim of the door. He could already see the path set before them, and it troubled him. This is what it meant to be a Crownsguard. All the training within Citadel walls couldn’t compare to reality. Out here, in the countryside, fending off attackers and assassins on his best friend’s behalf—this was what he took on when he agreed. And it was no role-playing game. It was life and death.

And he had been useless through all of it.

Back in the recesses of his darker thoughts, he realized something with sudden urgency. Niflheim was now at war with Lucis. Niflheim was the enemy. 

And now, so was Prompto.

He scratched the skin underneath his leather wristband, and wondered how he would survive keeping his secret any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I _do_ have a bug-out bag, and so should you.
> 
> Thanks for the reads and the kudos! I appreciate every single one of you. :)


	8. Chapter 8

_The smell of rain lingered earthy in the air._

_A window lay open somewhere. It spurred Prompto to run faster, and soon he was pulling the girl down the walkway, through a series of storage rooms and dormitories. Another right turn, and a door sat precariously open at the far end of the room. Rain drizzled through the light of a streetlamp onto oil-slicked pavement. They ran for the door, buzzing with adrenaline._

_Outside, Prompto felt the cool of rain touch his skin for the first time in his life. It chilled his scalp and ran down the sides of his face, wetting the shoulders of his laboratory garb. The girl paused as he did to stare up at the sky. Her pale hair clung to her forehead in little spindles, and he could not tell where her tears stopped and the rain began. He pulled on her hand to remove her from her trance. When she looked at him, all the gray of the cold world hidden inside her eyes, she cracked a sad smile. They ran down the steps, hand in hand, down the road as fast their tired feet could carry them. They believed they were free, already rejoicing in the happiness of their release._

_The screams behind them sounded off, inhuman, daemonic. Prompto’s insides became ice, and they ran for their lives again, even faster than before, until her small hand was ripped backward out of his. He stopped and turned, saw a legion of Deathless lined within the confines of an unstable fence, and saw the girl in the man’s arms. The man smiled a cockeyed leer before twisting her face to the side._

“N-no!” Prompto cried out, jerking hard from his fitful sleep. He clutched at his heart, felt the dampness of his shirt under his palm and the line of sweat beading down from his neck. He inhaled deep and brought his face to his hand. Even his hair felt damp, sticking to his temples.

The rumbling snore of Gladiolus reminded him where he was. The tent occupied only two other people. Noctis’ covered figure hovered a mere foot away, yet he slept soundlessly through Prompto’s nightmare. His eyes fell on Ignis’ empty sleeping bag. And then Aura’s.

He didn’t make a habit of rising early, but when he saw Aura was not sleeping, he didn’t want to be in the tent any longer. He wiped his forehead on the back of his hand and rose. He stumbled out into the near dark dawn, the sun having not even shown anything but a pale glow on the horizon. The campsite lay bare, smoldering wood in the dying fire, except for Ignis who stood behind his grill, setting out the pans for preparation of breakfast. He appeared surprised when he saw Prompto.

“Bright and early, are we?” he asked, disbelieving.

Prompto yawned for dramatic effect, though he felt amply awake. “Morning. Where’s Aura?”

Ignis smirked. “Ah. That’s why.” He laid down a cutting board and poured himself a cup of coffee. The cool of the morning brought a wave of steam rolling from the aluminum cup and the press. “I haven’t seen her. I imagine she’s gone on a walk.”

“At this hour? In the dark?”

“She’s made it clear she can take care of herself, Prompto. You shouldn’t react so fast and to unnecessary stress levels. It’ll compromise your health.”

“Save the health advice for Noct. I’ll overreact when I feel like it.” He walked to the edge of the campsite, to the edge of the sigils on the packed earth, and watched the landscape between them and the dawn. The smell of brine puckered his nose. He saw no movement, save for what he thought was a bask of Sea Devils nesting below a cluster of scraggly trees beside the Maidenwater.

“Prompto?” Ignis said behind him.

“Mm?”

“She really is fine.”

“Oh.” He crossed his arms. “Yeah. I know.”

He sat on a nearby rock and intended to wait out the dawn. He was unsure how long he waited, watching as the sun peaked over the horizon and lit the grassy landscape. Behind him, soft _thunks_ sounded from Ignis’ knife on the cutting board, and the occasional sizzle as Ignis added something fresh to a hot pan. 

The previous day had proven to be a struggle. They had all traveled the majority of it and even well into the night before Noctis begged Ignis to find a campsite. They had fended off the attacks of several additional airships after their initial encounter, and after the last one, exhaustion befell them immediately. Even trying to hide the Regalia within the trees had been a chore.

As Prompto had expected, judging by the photo he had taken of Lestallum, Old Lestallum had also been overrun with Imperials. An entire garrison had been constructed nearby, and Ignis had to drive the long way around with his headlights off to bypass the area. They were near to Cape Shawe, having traveled the entire southern rim of the Lucian continent, but still not there. Behind their campsite, the Rock of Ravatogh blazed unearthly orange in the muted morning light.

When Prompto heard the rustle of the tent flap, he rose from his spot on the rock. He turned to see Gladio standing at the tent opening in baggy slacks and no shirt, ready for his morning workout. When he saw Prompto, he raised an eyebrow.

“Why on Eos are you up?” Gladio asked.

“Don’t bother, you already know,” Ignis mumbled under his breath as he whisked a mealy mixture in a small bowl.

Gladio shook his head and opened his mouth to say something, when a short scuffle sounded in the rocks below and behind Prompto. He turned in time to see Aura climbing back up to the camp, a small pack slung across his torso and laying against her hip. Her top was long sleeved and dark, her shorts also black, and her hair was pulled away from her glistening face. She saw the three of them and smiled.

“Hey, you’re back,” Prompto said, a little too eagerly. 

“Morning.”

“Good morning, Aura,” Ignis replied. “Off on a walk?”

“Run.”

Gladiolus looked like he had been struck in the face. “Wait, what? Already?”

She stopped. “Was I supposed to wait for you?”

His mouth formed a tight line.

“Oh, here, Ignis.” She pulled off the pack and opened it. “I found some foods you might like for your cooking.” Out of the pouch, she pulled out garlic bulbs, mushrooms, several bundles of wrapped turmeric roots, and a handful of speckled peach-colored eggs wrapped in a cloth.

Now, it was Ignis’ turn to be taken aback. “You found all this in one run?”

“It wasn’t inconvenient at all, if that’s what worries you.”

“No, I am just...well, thank you, Aura.” He gathered the ingredients and piled them into the baskets of foodstuffs behind him.

“Anything I can do to help?” she asked as she pulled herself up next to him behind the cutting board.

“Certainly, if you wish. I still need to make the chutney, if you know how.”

“Kinda. Diced or chunked, or does it matter?” she asked, grabbing up a tomato and knife.

“Diced will do, as that a couple of our members dislike consuming their vegetables.”

“I’ll go ahead and guess which ones.” She flicked her gaze up to Prompto when he pulled over one of the collapsible chairs and sat in it.

“I eat them,” he said, frowning. “I just don’t like them hidden in anything. Or touching anything.”

“I’m going to take off,” Gladio grumbled. He dropped over the side of the campsite, trotting down the incline toward the bubbling river.

“So when does the Prince rise and shine?” Aura asked, chopping the tomatoes and sliding the pieces into a pile to the side.

“Not for at least another hour,” Ignis replied, “and only because we’ve forced him awake by then.”

“Whose duty is that? Yours?”

“We draw straws.”

“Wow. Tough,” she said, popping a small piece of tomato in her mouth. “Oh. These are Weaverwild tomatoes.”

Ignis turned to look at her. “Yes?”

“What are you making?”

“Garden pancakes with a tomato chutney.”

“Just a suggestion,” she said, “but the tomatoes at Kettier Highlands don’t have the bite Weaverwild tomatoes do. They’re slightly sweeter. Make for a richer sauce.”

Ignis never looked so blindsided in all his life. “Uh, thank you. I’ll keep that in mind should we cross there again.”

“Careful, Aura,” Prompto said, grinning. “You’re stepping on Iggy’s toes. He’s never had someone challenge his favorite skill before.”

She scooped the pile of tomatoes into a small bowl. “Some people who don’t frequent here don’t know there’s a subtle difference between the two. I think it’s something to do with more minerals in the dirt at Kettier.”

But Ignis did not look convinced. He looked stunned even, and kept quiet while he flipped vegetable cakes over in the skillet. She stirred his suggested ingredients into the tomatoes—vinegar, sugar, and various spices—until it was ready to simmer. She emptied the chutney into a small pot and lit the corresponding eye, then poured coffee into her own aluminum cup.

“I would continue to help, but I need to get out of these clothes.”

Ignis hummed and nodded.

She took her coffee and ducked back into the tent, shuffling around near Noctis’ sleeping form. Prompto turned his attention to Ignis.

“Hey, man. You okay?”

Ignis turned his gaze up, then dropped it. “Yes. Why?”

“She hurt your feelings?”

“If I had feelings to be hurt, no, she did not. She merely…”

Prompto raised an eyebrow.

“She impressed me, is all. Nothing more.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“The look on your face, man. Not sure I believe you.”

A weary sigh. “Are you willing to help me with breakfast?”

Prompto inhaled deep, and let out a long, drawn out ‘nope’.

“Then you can go wake the sleeping Prince from his beauty slumber.”

He pouted. “Wha..? What about drawing straws?”

“I can either cook, or tend to Noct, but I simply cannot do both.”

Prompto groaned, unwilling to wake Noctis this early, but even more unwilling to cook. Waking Noctis was sometimes a chore requiring too much work. Sometimes, it was a chore with physical consequences. He reluctantly rose from his seat to the tent and ducked inside.

But to his surprise, Noctis was already awake, his black hair matted against his forehead. He sat upright next to Aura, who had changed into her daytime clothes. Her sleeping bag sat bundled up tightly in the cords of her backpack. She had her cup pressed to her lips, mumbling something to Noctis.

“You’re awake?” Prompto asked.

“I think so,” Noctis replied, rubbing the corner of his eye. “Breakfast ready?”

“Yeah, just about.”

Noctis grumbled, then picked himself up and stumbled out of the tent, leaving Prompto alone with Aura. Prompto dropped onto his sleeping bag and huffed.

“Aura, seriously.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“What the hell?”

She dropped her eyebrow back down. “Problem?”

“Yes. You. What are you doing? Or, not doing. Or, something. I’m not sure.”

“There I go, bruising your adorable masculinity again.”

“Yes. Wait, no! Definitely no. More like…where have you been my whole life?”

She let out a short laugh, and he beamed at the sound. It was not the first laugh she had given, but it was the first he had pulled from her, and somehow, it felt like the first genuine one. 

“How enticing,” she said. “I have been successfully wooed.”

“I know I have,” he blurted before he thought about what he was saying. His face instantly grew hot. “I mean…” He cleared his throat. “Just impressed with how well you handle yourself. You really don’t seem to need anybody.”

A smile peaked at the corners of her mouth. “I wouldn’t say that, but yeah, I’ve handled myself alone pretty well.”

“You always been alone?”

“Since birth,” she said with a shrug.

“You don’t have any parents.”

She shook her head. “You?”

Something dark crawled through his belly. “Oh, yeah! Back home in Insomnia. I never got to see them much growing up, they worked so much. But, yeah, good ole’ Mum and Dad.”

She gave a tight nod, almost disappointed in his answer. “You’re very lucky then.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I loved them, but they really never were around. Couldn’t even show up for my Crownsguard coronation. Most the time I had to feed myself and put myself to bed.”

Her head tilted. “But you had _someone_ to love, even if they were rarely there.”

“Sometimes, it would have been better if I had no one.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He shook his head. “Hey, this isn’t about me. This was supposed to be about you. You…seriously…just cannot seem to do wrong.”

“Eh, I wouldn’t say that,” she said.

“You already embarrassed Glad, impressed Iggy, and coaxed Noct out of his favorite pastime without so much as a scratch on your head.”

“In all fairness, he did tell me to screw myself when I first tried to wake him.”

“That’s nothing.” He pulled at a tuff of blond hair near his forehead as if to show her his scalp. “I’ve gotten permanent dents in my skull from all the boots he’s thrown at me.”

“You sure you weren’t dropped on your head as a baby?”

“Could be a bit of both. I’m sure I was a handful in my youth.”

She smiled big, and something about it put him at ease. It was a smile that reminded him of safer places. 

“So…you really have had nobody since you were born?” he asked.

Her smile faded to his disappointment. “Yeah. Well, no. That’s not true. I had somebody once.” 

“Yeah?” he asked, his curiosity peaked.

“A long time ago.”

“Continue?”

She smiled again, softer this time. “There’s nothing more to say. I…don’t think they’re on this Star anymore.”

“Oh! Oh.” His voice trailed off as he struggled for something encouraging to say. He opened his mouth to speak, but found it difficult, so he closed it again.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she replied, noticing. “I’ve made my peace with it.”

“Were you…close?”

“Yes, and no. It’s complicated.”

“How can one be close and not close with someone?”

Her eyes dropped. “He was my husband.”

A tightness stretched Prompto’s heartstrings and he couldn’t shake it away. “Oh.” He couldn’t say anything else. Aura didn’t seem like the kind of girl who would let anyone come that close to her. She barely let Prompto try. And she had had a husband before. His heart hurt in several different ways. He pushed his own pain away, as he always did, and settled on the pain he could feel on her behalf.

“Did he leave you?”

Her eyelids fluttered. “Yeah, but…it was for a good reason.”

“What reason could he possibly have?”

“That’s…too personal.”

“Oh!” He clasped his hands together tight to keep from wringing them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

She put a hand up to silence him. “It’s okay. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

He nodded, then raised his eyes back up to her. “And…you don’t think he’s alive anymore?”

She slowly shook her head.

At that moment, he wanted to touch her. He fought the longing to reach out and take her hand and show her some compassion. His fingers fidgeted with the idea, but he tightened his fist and tucked it inside the other. “If it brings you some comfort, Aura, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I won’t deny I feel a glimmer of hope now and again, but…thank you, Prompto.”

His heart warmed at the way his name sounded on her lips.

“Should we adjourn to eat those vegetable pancakes Ignis prepared for us, then?” she asked with a half-smile.

“Yes, let’s. You have to watch Noct eat these things though. Don’t say anything, just watch him.”

Her smile widened. “You enjoy torturing the Prince of Lucis?”

“He’s a friend first, a Prince second. Of course I enjoy this.” He stood and parted the tent flaps for her. She exited, and he followed her back out into the open dawn.

When they gathered their plates of breakfast, and Gladio returned from his morning run, they all sat around the smoldering logs to eat. Though Prompto relinquished his chair without protest for Aura and sat cross-legged on the ground, Aura did not take it. Instead, she dropped down next to Prompto again, their knees inches from touching.

They ate in a tired hush, save for the small snickering Prompto pulled from Aura each time he nudged her and gestured in Noctis’ direction. Noctis sat directly across from them, diligently picking his pancakes apart and eating only the mealy bread between vegetable chunks. His nose wrinkled at a particularly large dice of carrot. Though Ignis tried to remain pensive, the occasional exhale through his nostrils revealed how much patience he was losing.

“These are very good, Ignis,” Aura said unexpectedly. “Thank you for taking the time to make us breakfast.”

Ignis pulled his gaze up from his bite, then flicked it downward. He appeared stunned yet again. “You’re very welcome, Aura.”

And it occurred to Prompto, for the first time, how often he took for granted Ignis’ generous cooking. He stole a glance at Aura and gathered how appreciative she always seemed to be. Regardless of how small an offer, she thanked the giver. For the caravan, for meals, for Prompto’s condolences. For nearly everything offered to her she expressed gratitude.

“What are in these? I’m curious,” she continued.

“An array of vegetables. Carrots, broccoli, onions, peppers. And of course, the tomatoes.”

“Well, it’s very tasty. I’m impressed. It’s a clever way of making pancakes. As opposed to having your vegetables in a salad or something equally boring.”

Prompto wanted to steal another glance, wondering if she was as curious about the dish as she was making herself out to be, when he noticed Noctis across the logs staring hard at her. Prompto furrowed his brows and prepared to say something witty, when to his disbelief, Noctis dropped his eyes back to his plate and uneasily picked at a leafy green piece of his pancake. He put it in his mouth and chewed at it slowly, not smiling, but not frowning. He swallowed, then moved on to the next bite. And the next. Slowly, but surely, eating the meal Ignis had worked so hard to prepare for them.

And Ignis noticed. The exhaling stopped, replaced instead by a bewildered silence.

Prompto felt giddy. He smirked through the rest of his breakfast. He wanted so much to laugh, partially in confusion, partially in pure admiration.

_She really is fucking amazing._

* * * * *

After breakfast cleared, and the smoldering logs died out, Ignis and Noctis spent a fair amount of time discussing preparations for the upcoming few days. Gladio occupied the time practicing his reflexes, summoning and sheathing his greatsword against several trees at the base of the campsite. Aura procured another walk, and Prompto decided he needed a breather for himself. He hopped down from the campsite, grateful to be away from Ignis and Noctis debating the pros and cons of the Seershand and possible peace treaties with Tenebrae. He passed Gladio as the big guy clipped his sword ten inches into the side of an oak.

“Where’re you going?” Gladio asked with a nod in Prompto’s direction.

“Bath time!” he shouted with a grin. “Going to the river. I stink.”

“I’ll say. Wash the blood out of your hair while you’re at it.”

Prompto dropped onto level ground winding through the trees and headed in the direction of the Maidenwater. The bask of Sea Devils from earlier had moved further upstream to Prompto’s relief. When he reached the river, he walked downstream until he found a secluded spot in the shade of several trees where the calm water narrowed. A cluster of stones marked the edge of a clear-running pool. He approached a flattened, rocky edge overlooking the river. At the edge, he shrugged his vest off to the rocks and yanked his shirt over his head. He instinctively touched his neck, only to be met with a vacant spot. For two weeks he had worn Aura’s dog tag, and yet after a couple days without it, he found he still tried to reach for it. He shook his head at himself, pulling off his boots and pants, and then finally his boxer briefs. All his clothing went into a pile, and he sat on the rim of the rock and dropped his bare legs into the river. The water felt like ice and stung for a second before he relaxed. 

As he adjusted to the temperature, his hand fidgeted over his leather wristband. He unhooked the clasps and dropped the wristband on top of his shirt. When it was gone, he rubbed the pruned flesh of his naked wrist and the codeprint marked there.

The feeling of loneliness had always been a prevalent part of Prompto’s life. He could mark every inch of his life with some sensation of being alone, and he always hoped at the least he could grow accustomed to it. But he never outgrew it. The dire feeling remained, even when he lost weight, when he gained the confidence to seek out girlfriends, when he opened up to his adoptive parents…when he became friends with Noctis. The feeling of loneliness never left him.

But here, in the now, with Niflheim breaking in through the back door, that loneliness he had always felt became something more dreadful. It filled him with despair, and his stomach ached with the thought of anyone finding out just how lonely he was. Though he doubted many regular people would know about Niflheim’s codeprints, or anything about their militarized system, fear still crippled him. He was a lost boy, alone in the world.

He dropped his face to his hand, feeling the ache pull at his chest again as memories from his nightmare came in a giant flood. His heart throbbed. He didn’t like remembering. He never liked remembering. But if he didn’t remember, no one else would. And then it would be as if it never happened.

It was a secret he intended to take to his grave.

Filling his lungs with air and pushing the ache aside, he slid off the rock and dropped like a stone into the cold Maidenwater. The iciness rushed over his skin and tightened it, forcing every muscle in his body to rigidity. He reemerged into open air, blowing water from his face and wiping it away. He scrubbed at his skin, raking his fingernails through his hair to rinse the dried blood somehow caked there, when a noise from the underbrush nearby made him jump.

_For the love of the Six, please don’t be a Sea Devil._

He pulled himself over to the rock and stood unsteadily, the shallow water hitting mid-thigh. He tensed his hand and prepared to summon his Rebellion.

And then, worse than a Sea Devil, a figure emerged from the bushes.

“Fuck!” he spat, immediately grabbing for his shirt that sat closest to him.

“Oh, shit!” Aura said, jumping back at the sight of him naked. “I’m sorry!”

“W-what are you doing here?” he sputtered, pressing his shirt to his crotch.

“I came down for a swim,” she explained, covering half of her face and turning slightly. “I didn’t realize anyone was down here.”

He shivered, the water dripping from every surface of his skin. “Could you, uh, turn around, or something?”

“Oh! Yeah, okay.” She spun around and waited. “Actually, don’t let me interrupt. I’ll just go further downstream.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I was just about done,” he lied.

“Are you sure? Because you still look dirty.”

“Yeah, sure, I’m fine. I’ll just go, and you can…” He trailed off, glancing around. He couldn’t find his wristband. He had set it down on his clothes.

_Where is it?_

“Hey, seriously, don’t fret. I’m going to find somewhere else to swim.”

“N-no! This is already too far down.” He grabbed his pants and flipped them over, then shuffled around his boots.

“What are you doing?”

“Are you looking at me?” he asked, alarmed.

“Sorry!” She wheeled back around.

_Where is my wristband?_

Then he remembered. He dropped it on his shirt when he removed it. And now he was holding his shirt.

“Shit,” he mumbled, searching the water to see if he flung the wristband in his panic. The distorted light across the water’s surface made it near impossible to see the bottom. He shuffled around, hoping to step on it.

“Uh, you still there?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m here. I just lost something.”

“Your self-esteem?”

“Har, har. No, my wristband.”

“Do you need help finding it?”

His heart skipped a beat. “Uh, no…that’s not necessary.” Thinking quickly, he grabbed his bandana that usually wrapped around his bicep and tied it tight to his wrist. 

“You sure?”

He scrambled out of the water and scooped his clothes up, yanking them on one at a time backward and inside out and clinging to his drenched skin. He barely acknowledged her, knowing if he spent another minute in her presence he wouldn’t want to leave.

“Are you really done? I mean, I feel like I’m chasing you off.” She glanced over her shoulder to confirm he was fully dressed.

“Yeah, I’m…I’m done. Don’t worry about it.” He walked backward and pointed upstream. “Just, uh…be careful. Of the Sea Devils. Up there.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He nodded, and then she began unbuttoning her hide pants and sliding them down her hips. He quickly averted his gaze. He was not going to do this again.

He hurried away. Several seconds later, he heard the splash of water behind him, and he could only guess she had jumped in. A sultry image of her naked body flashed in his head. His body trembled, and a few curses tumbled from his lips. He was not going to delve into those kinds of thoughts. His hand wiped through his soaking hair. As he returned to the campsite, everyone was still in the same position he left them.

“So did you forget something, Prom?” Gladio sheathed his greatsword and crossed his arms, giving him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Don’t think so,” Prompto replied. He was wearing all his clothes.

“I don’t know, maybe bathing?”

He lacked the energy to retort. Not with his wristband gone. Not with images of a wet, naked Aura in his head.

_Fuck._

“Yeah, something came up. Couldn’t finish.” He waved Gladio off and climbed the rest of the incline to the campsite, finding the intense political topics between Ignis and Noctis suddenly much more appealing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't plan to delay updating the next chapter, but I'm warning you guys I'll be out of town this weekend for a wedding. If you have to wait a few extra days, I apologize in advance!
> 
> I really hope you guys are enjoying this as much as I'm enjoying writing it. Thanks everyone! :)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience! I didn't think I was ever going to get this chapter uploaded.
> 
> First, a quick story time:
> 
> This fanfiction is available for you to read only because of my husband's insistence. For the past [insert really, really long time], I've been working on a fantasy adventure series, and it completely absorbed me. I became an emotional mess over it, ricocheting between 'this is New York Times Bestseller quality' and 'I should just quit because my story is garbage and I'm garbage'. My husband has been pushing me to work on other stories, and when he found out about me writing this, he begged me to put it up online. I didn't think anyone would read it much less care, but he said I needed it. And he was right. I did. This fanfiction has been so liberating that I was actually surprised how good it's made me feel. It made me remember why I love writing. 
> 
> And honestly, if it weren't for you guys, I would be revolving around the 'I'm garbage' feelings again. So thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much.
> 
> All right, let's get back to it then. :)

Prompto could not help the jumping up and down of his knee as he mindlessly chewed on his thumbnail. He listened as well as his capabilities allowed to Ignis and Noctis planning their next few days, and even their next few weeks, in Tenebrae, but other, stronger thoughts and images continued to intrude his head.

Aura swimming down at the river, for one.

The fact she once had a husband, for another.

She had seen him naked.

And his fucking wristband.

He stifled a weary groan, wanting to crawl into a dark, secluded hole. Heat flared across his face when he thought all these overwhelming thoughts at once.

“I would hate to abandon the Regalia as well, but there is a possibility we might not have much of a choice, Noct.”

“We should at least hide it. So we can retrieve it later.”

Ignis and Noctis shuffled through ideas in discussion, namely how to react in the event Imperials overran the marina at Cape Shawe. And if so, whether they stayed to fight, used stealth to sneak by, or withdrew to secure another available boat elsewhere.

“He did say you were good at it.”

One of them murmured indistinguishable syllables. Prompto fell out of the sound, finding concentrating more difficult. Aura had a husband before. 

_Wouldn’t that make her a widow?_

“Right…?”

She had seen him naked. Though she said nothing, his codeprint had remained uncovered when she emerged from the brushy path.

_Did she see it?_

“Prompto?”

“What? Yes! I’m here!” He released his thumbnail from his teeth and acknowledged the two before him. Both stared back. “You ask something?”

“Not really,” Noctis said. “But you looked so stressed I thought I would pull you out of your thoughts.”

“Noct merely reminded me my larceny skills were…how did you put it, Prompto…‘real GTA-like’.”

“Ah, yeah. I did say that.”

“You okay?” Noct asked.

The words sounded small, for the brevity of their letters, but to Prompto, they managed to amass a whirlwind of a thousand thoughts all at once. He couldn’t say anything, though he wanted to say everything.

“Yeah, dude. Just…wondering…what Ignis put in those pancakes.”

“Cute. Seriously, you okay?”

_No._ “I’m always okay. Do I look that bad?”

“You’re soaking wet, you haven’t said a word since you came back from the river, and you’re chewing your nails down to the bone.”

“Psh. Normal stuff.”

“Whatever.” Noctis let his head fall on the back of his chair. “So. The Regalia is purposefully hidden. We make it to the marina. We secure a boat at all costs unless there simply isn’t one. And then Succarpe.”

Ignis nodded, leaning forward. “The Transcontinental Line should bring us from the Succarpian docks and then straight to Tenebrae. But it’s still incredibly dangerous territory, regardless of Niflheim’s occupation. Additionally, we have no way of knowing if Tenebrae has experienced the same level of hostility as Lucis. We may be walking back into the same situation as we did at the Insomnian border.”

“That’s where we’re at,” Noctis said. “What do you think Prompto?”

Prompto’s knee bounced. “Uh, well, what about Umbra?”

“Umbra?” Noctis asked, as if he had not thought that route.

“I mean, Umbra usually appears to you to deliver messages.” His knee stopped. “You shuffled a book back and forth with Luna pretty much since I’ve met you. You could write something in it and ask for help.”

“Do you have a way of summoning Lady Lunafreya’s dog?” Ignis asked.

Noctis rubbed at the scalp above his temple. “Not deliberately. I’ve never tried. Umbra usually just appeared at the right moments.”

“Can you?” Prompto asked. “So we know we’re not walking into another trap?”

“If you tried, Noct,” Ignis added, “we could deliver a message to the Nox Fleuret House. They could arrange for assistance to meet us in Succarpe.”

Noctis snorted. “Yeah, let me just find my magical creature summoning kit real quick and I’ll get on it.”

“We’re walking into blind territory,” Ignis continued. “Anything would help, despite your derision.”

“Right. I’ll commune for a spell…or something.” Noctis clapped on his knees and rose from his seat. “Don’t know what I’m doing, but I guess it’ll fall along the lines of ‘thinking really hard’.”

“Thataboy!” Prompto said with a cheesy grin.

“Don’t.” And Noctis walked the campsite’s decline, down into the cluster of trees past where Gladio practiced.

“We’re counting on you, Buddy!” he yelled after him.

Noctis tossed up a hand in mock irritation.

Prompto chuckled under his breath, but it died out the instant Aura climbed back onto the campsite. She slicked her wet hair to the side of her shoulder. He felt hot, despite the chill of his soaked clothes, and wished he had been preoccupied with something other than sitting and talking so he could avoid being in her vicinity. He quickly turned to Ignis and mentally prepared to ask him about other plans for Tenebrae, but the mentor stood and walked back down the incline to speak to Gladio. Once again, Prompto was alone with Aura. He cursed to the Astrals under his breath.

She approached him, and his knee began to bounce again on its own. He pinched his lips closed.

When she reached him, she lowered and grabbed his hand. Where their skin touched, fire lingered, and his heart ignited with warmth. Then she opened his fingers and plopped his sodden leather wristband in his palm.

“Thought you’d like it back,” she said with a devious smile.

The blood in his body flushed to his skin. “T-thanks.”

She nodded, but before leaving, she leaned forward near his shoulder. Her body hovered inches above him, and the warmth radiated from her like a corporal fire. 

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed, Prompto. You really do have a nice body.”

_Oh, Gods._

And like that, fire rushed through. Every. Inch. Of. Him.

She rose and walked over to one of the unoccupied chairs. He couldn’t keep his eyes from watching her ass shift around underneath her loose pants. She sat and faced him.

“I, uh…” He didn’t have a proper response.

“What’s the plan?” she asked instead, noting his discomfort.

He swallowed the hard knot lodged in his throat and hooked his wet wristband on the opposite wrist. He would have to return it to the proper wrist later after he removed the bandana. “Uh, well, Noct is going to try to, I guess, summon a magical dog and send a message to Tenebrae. And when he’s done, we’re going to hit the road and head to Cape Shawe.”

She narrowed her stormy gaze. “Lady Lunafreya’s dog?”

One of his eyebrows jumped. “Wait, what? You know about Umbra?”

“Of course I do.”

“Of course you do? Are you from Tenebrae?”

She lifted one shoulder and dropped it.

“That’s not an answer. You’re as bad as Noct.”

“Well, I wasn’t born in Tenebrae, but I frequent there a lot. So, yes and no.”

“Anyway, if he sends a message, hopefully we’ll receive help when we arrive in Succarpe.” His arms crossed themselves. “You _frequent_ Tenebrae? What’s in Tenebrae?”

Again, another half-shrug.

He sulked. “Why do I even ask? It’s like, I know I’m going to get a ‘maybe’ answer, but I still ask hoping you’ll give me some little secret of yours.”

“You want my secrets?” Her devious smile from earlier returned.

He quickly waved his hands. “Oh, no! Not secrets. I’m not trying to pry information out of you, or anything. Sorry if it sounds that way. I just…” He clasped his hands in his lap, fidgeting. “Look, I just want to get to know you. That’s all. I’m sorry if it comes across as stalkerish again.”

She chuckled. “So you have a nice body _and_ you’re sweet. Two points in my book.”

He knew he was blushing before he felt the heat on his skin.

Down in the trees, sudden shouting interrupted them.

“It’s not working!” Noctis yelled out. “Let’s just pack up and go!”

Prompto snorted into a dreadful laughter. When Aura met him with a look of confusion, he shrugged at her.

“He can summon weapons,” he explained, “but apparently he can’t summon pets.”

* * * * *

The breeze felt warmer than usual as it rustled across Prompto’s arm and through his hair. The Rock of Ravatogh emitted immense heat and loomed over the Regalia on the road like a dormant god of its own right. He stared up at it as they skirted its shadow. Corneous extrusions, glowing gold and rust, scraped the underside of a steamy afternoon sky.

Noctis’ failure, if one could call it that, with summoning Umbra was expected. An idea built on false hope. When Noctis delivered the news he could not call Lady Lunafreya’s dog, they hastily packed the Regalia and headed in the direction of Cape Shawe. Already several hours into their trip, yet they hadn’t encountered any of Niflheim’s Imperial soldiers and their airships. A few ships speckled the sky in the far distance near Lestallum.

In the front seat, Ignis and Gladio spoke to one another in low hushes. Noctis slept soundly against the frame of the door on his side, releasing small snores every so often when he readjusted. The arrangement left Aura and Prompto, amply awake side by side, not saying a word to one another.

_She once had a husband._

Of all the thoughts running a marathon through his head, it was the only thought he couldn’t bat down with reason. A spur of jealousy propelled through him, yet all the logic in Eos could not reassure him. She didn’t know Prompto. She had every right to have a life before him. She had every right to have prior relationships.

_But a husband?_

He shook and sighed, drawing in balmy air to fill his lungs and calm him down. He considered maybe he had the hang of it, taking deliberate inhalations, when a warm hand pressed lightly against his bare shoulder.

He rose himself from the door frame and turned to look at Aura. And melted. Her smile could calm a hundred wars inside his heart with one look.

“Nervous?” she asked through that smile.

He half-shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“It’ll be okay. You guys are strong and smart, and you work well together. This should be a cake-walk.”

“Thanks for thinking so. But it doesn’t keep me from being on edge.” Though he did admit, her reassuring words helped to calm him slightly.

The radio, which had been softly playing at a low volume, started up a familiar song. Prompto forcibly grinned, trying to push away his anxiety, and hummed along.

“ _My heart’s in a drought, please give me the rain,_ ” Prompto sang beneath a murmur.

“Prompto, no,” Gladio said, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Why not? It’s kinda my favorite song.”

“Because I’m tired. I don’t want to listen to it.”

“Come on, big guy, sing it with me,” he said, louder now. “ _It’s not raaaining…my heart is dyingg sloow-lyy…_ ”

“Prompto, please,” Ignis begged. “He’s not the only one tired.”

“Woah-oh-oh-OH…. _all I wanted_ …woah-oh-oh-OH…”

“ _Rain faaallling,_ ” Aura sang alongside him.

A smile, unlike his plastered one, stretched across Prompto’s face.

“Oh, Gods, not you, too,” Gladio mumbled, turning to glare at her.

“Yes, her, too!” Prompto said, beaming. “Everybody sing with us!”

“Woah-oh-oh-OH!” she sang.

“ _All I needed!_ ”

“Woah-oh-oh-OH!”

“ _Rain faaallling!_ ”

“Smite them, Etro,” Noctis mumbled through his sleep. “Smite them both.”

“Hey, don’t joke!” Prompto said, pushing at Noctis’ knee. “She might actually do it.”

“Stop being loud then.” Noctis shifted, trying to find comfort against the door frame again. “Why are you always so loud, Prom?”

“Because I don’t know any other volume.”

“Hey,” Aura murmured to Prompto, “you have your camera?”

“Yeah, but the battery’s low.”

“Enough to take one photo?”

“Sure.” Prompto reached into his vest and pulled the camera out, pressing the power button.

“Take a selfie with me,” she said.

He warmed all over. Eagerly, he stretched his arm out, catching him and her in the viewfinder, until he realized she leaned against Noctis. She gave him a waggle of one eyebrow and opened her mouth, preparing. He smiled and prepared with her.

Together, they belted out at an obnoxious volume the remainder of the chorus—leaning against Noctis. Prompto snapped the photo at the exact moment Noctis jumped, one eye half open, the other still closed, his hair a disheveled mess in the air around his forehead and jaw gritted.

“Fuck, you guys!” Noctis blurted before he sat wide awake. “Seriously?”

Aura laughed a lovely, lilting sound. “Ah, I’m so sorry, your Highness. I wanted so much to do it.”

Noctis blinked heavily at her, stunned, then stared out ahead as he gathered his wits about him. Prompto grinned as he pocketed the camera again, instantly feeling lighter than before when he admitted his nervousness.

The rest of the hours drifted on in silence, and as evening approached, calling up the dusk, the sharpness of brine intensified. Ravatogh had come and gone behind them as they approached the cape at the southwestern Lucian shoreline. Eventually, the cape town emerged on the horizon, and Ignis took its reveal as a cue to slow the Regalia and begin the search for a hiding spot. Gladio noted a car lot beyond a chain link fence. The gate hung from the hinges. Most of the impounded cars in the lot were rusted over from the oceanic breeze, but all were clearly abandoned. Ignis drove into the sandy lot and parked in a spot near the middle underneath a dismantled eon-old crane. They piled out and unpacked the trunk of as much useful luggage as they could. Each carried their own backpack with a sleeping bag attached. They divvied up as many of the ingredients as they could into their individual packs, but ultimately had to leave the portable stove and most its cooking wares, the collapsible chairs, and the tent.

“Here’s hoping we won’t have to make camp in Succarpe,” Gladio muttered as he closed the trunk.

“Aw, poor baby can’t camp without his modern conveniences,” Aura said.

He dropped his head and turned to stare at her.

She met his gaze and rose her hands in surrender. “Whoa, sorry. I’ve only been doing it without all this stuff for five years, so I’m used to it.”

Noctis snorted.

“All right, hot shot. If we have to make camp, you take the lead,” Gladio answered.

She shrugged. “Sure, if a big guy like you needs the assistance.”

“Oh, you think you’re funny.” Gladio then pointed at Prompto. “Too much like this one, let me tell you.”

“Nah, I’m waaay cuter,” Prompto said. Though he didn’t believe a word of it.

“All set?” Ignis asked the group.

Everyone issued their words of affirmation and tightened their packs straps across their shoulders and chests. Before they left, Noctis gave the Regalia two affectionate pats on the trunk.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be back for you,” he said, then turned to lead them all back out to the road.

Prompto lingered behind for the beat of a breath to stare at the vehicle. The Regalia meant more to Noctis than to any of the others for reasons having to do with his father, the King, but when Prompto stared at it, he felt a loneliness he didn’t think he would ever shake. They had lived out of the vehicle for several months, and had even spent an uncomfortable night in it once when they first began their journey. It was the vehicle Cindy loved more than him. He gathered his feelings on the matter to resolve if her lack of interest still bothered him or not, and it didn’t. But seeing the Regalia alone in an automobile graveyard tore him up. Pushing his ache aside, he followed the others back out, and together, they walked alongside the road into the heart of Cape Shawe.

The cape town was significantly smaller than Lestallum, but larger than most other Lucian towns. The buildings spread across the backdrop of darkening waters like a row of jagged, yellowing teeth. A single, glittering lighthouse speared the center of town’s bay, beckoning all outbound ships to dock. Except no outbound ships floated in the bay.

“It’s quiet,” Noctis noted, slowing his pace.

“We have to assume they’ve evacuated to Insomnia,” Gladio added unsurely.

“Remember, we don’t flee,” Ignis said. “We find a boat by any means necessary. Otherwise we don’t stand a chance for escape a second time.”

Their pace slowed even more the closer they approached Cape Shawe. Everything lay in shadows, brought on by a darkness only characterized by the vacancy of an entire town. Across the waters in the distance, the spear of a darkened lighthouse at Cape Caem resembled a needle in a pincushion. Prompto shuddered, despite the evening’s balminess.

“Feels like we’re walking into a spooky, haunted house video game,” Prompto muttered, “only that house is a town, and that video game is real life, and that spooky and haunted is really a living daemonic hell.”

The darkness swallowed them on the outskirts of the town, and still no life wandered through its streets. When no lights flickered on in the coming night, Prompto switched on the light hanging from his vest.

“Illuminate!” he exclaimed when it lit the ground before him in cool blue.

“Okay, don’t be a nerd too quick, Prom,” Noctis said underneath a laugh. “We don’t know if it’s really vacant.”

“De-illuminate!” The light snapped off, shrouding his path in shadow again.

Small carts and wooden vendor stands littered both sides of the main road leading into Cape Shawe, though their sellers were long gone. Several vehicles were left abandoned by the side of the road, their doors wide open and their contents stripped from devastation looters. The sun set beyond the seas, and were it not for the lighthouse slowly sliding its beacon across the bay’s surface, the town would be blanketed in complete night. They passed several small apartment buildings, a Crow’s Nest diner, and a motel, before they visibly relaxed.

“It really does look like no one is here,” Gladio said.

“Makes our job easier,” Noctis added with a sigh of relief. “Let’s just get to the docks and find a boat.”

“Hopefully one with an owner who remembered to fill up the tank,” Ignis said, smirking. “Without needing to be told a hundred times first.”

“You really going to do this, Specs?”

“It doesn’t seem to matter if I do it now or do it at a more convenient time, the response will always be the same.”

Before Noctis could retort the rude curses everyone was sure brewed in his head, a hissing resounded through the air like a leaking steam pipe. Everyone stopped.

Beneath their feet, the pavement broke apart, releasing a galactic miasma into the shape of a hostile form. With no light, and no people, the town had become a cesspool for daemons. A steaming fissure split through the center of the group, separating Noctis, Gladio, and Ignis to one side, and Prompto and Aura to the other. The other three summoned their individual weapons from Noctis’ magic cache, but Aura reached out and grabbed Prompto’s wrists.

“Don’t,” she said only.

He struggled in her tight grip, trying to summon Rebellion, when a sturdy Bussemand, packed with solid muscle and bone, crawled out of the otherworld and rattled on its daemonic tongue. The pit of Prompto’s stomach twisted. The daemon spun left, then right, eyeing the two groups. 

_Wait. Why is it hesitating?_

Suddenly, all of the questions Prompto had formed in the deserts in Hammerhead rushed back. Memories of the indifferent Red Giant propelled through his head. 

The Bussemand passed its beady eyes over Aura and settled them on Prompto, as if unsure how to proceed. It barked once before Ignis took advantage of its confusion and thrust a polearm’s blade into the back of its neck. The Bussemand howled and slammed its hammer-like fists into the pavement before Gladio made quick work of severing its heavy, horned head from its neck. The head thudded to the ground like a magnet.

When the body evaporated into stardust, everyone stared at Aura.

“What the fuck was that?” Gladio asked, flexing every muscle in his body.

“A daemon, in case you missed it,” she answered stiffly.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about.” He crossed through the steam of the newly formed fissure in the pavement and stood inches from her. His jaw sawed back and forth. “You need to start giving answers. No more of this vague bullshit.”

“I have no answers to give you,” she said, releasing Prompto’s wrists finally and crossing her arms. “The only thing you need to know is that I’m on your side. The rest is superfluous.”

“Enough games!” he snapped. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did that daemon pause like that? Why did it glance over you like you weren’t something to be killed?”

“We don’t understand how daemons work. Maybe the only reason you—”

“Why did you keep Prompto from summoning his weapon?” he snapped, louder.

“You seriously going to fucking interrupt me, big guy?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. His upper lip twitched. “Like I was saying, maybe the only reason you four have problems with daemons is that you attack willingly without walking away first. Maybe because you have the Prince is tow, and they can smell magic. I don’t know. I’m not an expert. But I know I’ve never had problems with them before. Like I told you back in Hammerhead, daemons really aren’t so bad.”

“Lucis is under attack across the entire outlands and you want to play coy? You need to start talking. Address what just happened, and the abnormal healing overnight shit. How you can summon weapons is another I know we’re all curious about. ”

She dropped her hands to her side, finally standing at her full height. “Or what?”

Prompto couldn’t help himself. He quickly, aggressively, pushed himself in between Aura and Gladio, facing the Prince’s Shield.

“Back up. Now,” Prompto said in a voice that didn’t feel or sound like his.

“You have to see there’s some shady shit going on here, Prom,” he growled and bored his fierce eyes into Prompto’s. “Your dick can’t be so hard for her to not see that.”

“I said, back up.” Prompto’s hand shuddered, ready to summon his gun. “You may be strong, Gladio, but I’m faster than you.”

Ignis stepped forward and placed one gloved hand on Gladio’s shoulder, pulling slightly. “Stop this, Gladiolus. We will address all questions in Tenebrae when the Prince is safe.”

“Iggy’s right,” Noctis said. “Please, Gladio.”

“Noct, I’m doing you a favor. There’s something off with this girl and I don’t like it.”

“She already said she’s on our side. She’ll answer questions when she’s ready.”

Gladio narrowed his gaze at Aura past Prompto’s shoulder. “Will you? When we’re in Tenebrae, will you answer these questions?”

“When we’re in Tenebrae,” she said, slow, “I’m afraid a lot more questions are going to pop up than I have answers for.”

Gladio’s jaw sawed back and forth again. “But you swear it. You’re on our side?”

“I swear to it, I’m on your side.”

“Then why can’t you join the Crownsguard?”

Prompto stiffened. He quickly questioned if this was what the two of them talked about sitting in the rocks away from the others. When Gladio told her she was one of them now.

“I’ve told you,” she explained, “I simply can’t.”

“ _You simply can’t?_ That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Though Gladio seemed unhappy with the answer, he reluctantly backed down underneath Ignis’ hand. “Whatever. Be coy,” he mumbled. “Let’s just go.”

He stormed off without hesitation. Ignis sighed and followed. Noctis delivered a questioning pass between Prompto and Aura before he eventually turned and tailed Gladio as well. Prompto exhaled through his nostrils and faced Aura.

“I know you don’t want to answer anything,” he said, trembling, “but answer this one question for me: did what just happen have anything to do with the Red Giant in Hammerhead?”

She blinked. “I think you already know the answer to that, Sunshine.”

In the darkness of shadows and night, Prompto suddenly saw her. The sun-tinged skin, the wild dark hair, the gray eyes—all beautiful, physical features solely hers. But what he had never seen before was the way she looked at him—the deep, intimate look she gave no one else. As if she could see parts of his soul he didn’t know he had. She thanked him for standing up for her without saying a word. He knew it. He sensed comfort, as if she delivered a spiritual embrace without moving an inch. She was a fiery, tangible shadow he basked in, and unexpectedly, he felt as if he had known her his whole life.

“All right, Shadows,” he said. “Let’s go before they leave us behind.”

Her brows lifted slightly in the wake of her new nickname, and then after a thought, she smiled.

Nearby, the pavement began to split apart again underneath hisses and spats. Together, they both ignored it and trotted down the remainder of the deserted road. They dodged another miasma before it had the chance to reveal whatever daemonic thing lurked in its shadows.

They reached the others, and as they approached the marina, the smell of brine sharpened further on a warm gust driving through the streets. The wooden docks strutted out into the bay like criss-crossed lattice work, dotted here and there with several boats and three shipping freighters. But before they could acknowledge their luck, Noctis froze in place, causing Ignis to collide into him.

“Noct?” Ignis asked, straightening his askew glasses.

“Someone’s there,” he muttered, pointing ahead.

They all stopped. At a cement landing before the piers, a single, towering man faced the waters. The man boasted Gladio’s height, and quite nearly his build, but his languid stance suggested an indifference to the night and the vacancy of the town around him. His dark cloak, scrawled with open, white webs, billowed around his ankles in the ocean air.

Rather forcefully, Aura grabbed Prompto’s hand, leaving fire in his palm.

The man turned to acknowledge the five of them, as if perhaps the man had been expecting them. A mane of sangria color framed a devilishly charming face.

“The boats will not come, but they’ll certainly take you forth,” the man lilted in a voice far too soothing to be credulous. “If one knows how to drive such a vehicle.”

Noctis hesitated, fidgeting hands at his side as if unsure if he should materialize a weapon.

Gladio stepped forward in his stead. “Is that why you’re still here? Hoping someone could give you a ride?”

The man smiled a cockeyed leer before the lighthouse’s beam slid behind him, creating his silhouette. “Not quite. I’m here merely to expedite the secure travels of our dear Prince to safer territories.”

The relaxed demeanor of the entire group dissipated.

Gladio’s shoulders squared back tightly. “So what’s your story?”

“Just a impatient traveler, grudgingly biding my time as I have so much of it.” He placed one foot in front of the other, examining his nails with nonchalant arrogance as he approached. “The Empire seems to know when and where to make their mark. Yet their sloppiness has made a mess of the entire Lucis countryside. I’m here to put the pieces back in place.”

Gladio flexed, putting one foot in front of Noctis. “What does that mean?”

The man grinned, then gestured with dramatic display behind him toward a sturdy fishing vessel sitting just off the pier. “That one is fully ready to embark should you wish to continue.”

“Is it yours?”

“No. But I’m sure its former owner would not mind its unmerited use, knowing it went to transport such precious cargo.” The man passed through, parting them like a sea, until he stopped in front of Aura and Prompto. 

Aura visibly shook, tightening her grip on Prompto. 

The man’s mouth opened in joy as he prepared to say something profound to the two of them, but thought better of it and left them only with a smile.

“I see some things never change,” he merely said, passing on by and walking alone down the dark street. “Despite all the time I’ve given to see it happen.”

When the man disappeared into the thick of shadows, and the tapping of his boot heels echoing on the pavement could no longer be heard, they let out an exhale.

“Who in Eos was that?” Gladio asked.

“I haven’t a clue,” Noctis added. “Did he really say there was a boat available for us?”

“It would appear that way,” Ignis said. “We should make haste to secure it.”

Prompto released a staggering amount of air he had no idea he had been holding in his lungs. He became aware of how hard Aura still held his hand. The fire flickered into pain as her nails dug little crescent moons into his flesh.

“Hey,” he muttered.

She returned to the present and snapped her shadowed gaze up to him.

“You okay?”

She blinked, then quickly released his hand. “Sorry. I don’t know where I went.”

“You know him, don’t you?” Prompto asked, indicating the direction the man had traveled.

She didn’t answer, choosing to instead nod toward the boat. “We should hurry.”

Prompto grabbed her hand again, ignoring the sharp incisions she had left in his, and pulled her toward the pier. They rushed across the wooden planks, sidestepping growing starlit puddles of darkness. Around them, the shadowy specters of daemons emerged from the ground. Stifling heat wavered on the wind, and Prompto knew, without even glancing back, the heat was otherworldly by the way it felt on his bare skin. They leapt into the boat after the others, crashing into the salt-stained cushions of a two-person seat. Noctis dropped next to the driver’s seat, and Gladio took the bench in the rear. Ignis—after turning the key and performing several jumbled attempts at preparing the engine—slowly eased the boat away from the pier. Another Bussemand appeared beside them from seemingly nowhere and slammed its hammer-like fists in a flash of green, splintering the pier beneath its feet like a wooden firework. Sharp chips rained across Prompto’s bare arms and the back of his neck when he shielded Aura.

The boat revved and built its speed, tearing through the docks and out into the open bay. They broke the waters through the white glare of the lighthouse and sped past it. Along its earthy construct base, a dozen sinewy hobgoblins leapt at abnormal heights to scale the lighthouse’s outer walls. Prompto pulled his pack off and dropped it between his feet, relieved of the burden of its weight. Icy seawater misted across his face. The wind bristled the hairs on his arms and peppered gooseflesh all over his body. Tiny marks marred his skin where the wood cut him, but he shrugged their stings off, knowing they would be gone in a few hours.

He glanced up at Aura beside him. She covered her face with one hand and took shuddering breaths. The wind whipped her hair into a dark storm, and her necklaces jumped across the skin between her breasts. Prompto had fought for so long to not touch her, despite her willingness to touch him, but now, he couldn’t keep himself from doing it any longer. He reached out and gently wrapped his fingers around her wrist, below her turquoise wristlet, and pulled her hand down. She let him. Tears brimmed in the whites of her eyes, yet they did not fall. With two short breaths, the tears disappeared, and she smiled gently at him. He knew that look. Something happened to her with the eccentric stranger at the pier. He smiled back, and was not going to ask if she was okay. He knew too often how it felt to fake soundness. Sometimes silence was all one needed.

As they sped from Cape Shawe and Lucis, toward the darkened, dangerous Sathersea, Prompto held Aura’s hand. He ran his thumb soothingly across the back of it. Her soft fingers tightened around his. A flush spread across his face, despite the briskness of the oceanic wind, and he reveled in the comfort of her presence.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I am so sorry. This chapter is loaded with exposition, and I know how that hurts the eyes after awhile reading from a phone or computer screen.
> 
> Second, this chapter is shorter than others because the chapter I originally wrote became too long for my liking, so I broke the chapter into two parts. You should be getting another chapter shortly in a day or so as a result.
> 
> Thanks again for the kudos, comments, and subscriptions! It makes me so warm and fuzzy inside. :)

If Prompto could easily forget their seafaring voyage across the Sathersea in nothing more than a fishing vessel, it would not be a moment too soon. 

Despite Ignis passing off the helm to the others in clockwork shifts, the chamberlain became the definition of exhausted with his reddened eyes and his ease into uncharacteristic, delirious laughter at Prompto’s attempts at liveliness. Noctis was as silent as silent could be, and Gladio was simply Gladio—rough around the edges and belligerent in situations that did not call for it. Whatever Aura held back in Cape Shawe with her attempts at privacy, she mostly abandoned. She talked more, though personal things she still retained. Prompto did his best to liven the group, but all they wanted was a shower, a bed, and a meal in varying degrees of warmth.

They traveled nearly a week, perhaps longer. They lost track of time with the rising and setting of the constantly moving sun behind clouds. All felt sick to their stomachs with the lack of sustenance. They rationed their food as best as they were able, but raw vegetables did little to satiate the hunger. Short of eating the garlic bulbs Aura previously picked, they didn’t have many options. Prompto was sure he dropped ten pounds in that time frame.

For circumstances such as this, the ruling empires of Niflheim and Lucis had joined together years agao in days of peace to form fueling islands in international waters between the two continents. It was a miracle of miracles bestowed by the Astrals that the boat sputtered out of gas each time they approached one. As if the strange man in Cape Shawe knew exactly how much fuel the fishing boat could hold.

During these pit stops, the group scrounged together their gil to not only fuel the boat, but to fill up on fresh water that there never seemed to be enough of once they were out on the ocean. They disregarded all other foods, as they had no way to prepare any of it and anything salty or sweet would increase their need for more water.

The weather stayed cold and covered. They expected storms but experienced none, but the sun barely showed itself except in the small flashes between clouds to show them the time. Prompto prayed continuously for the Astrals to stave off any rain, as he didn’t believe his heart could handle it. Luckily, they listened.

It approached late afternoon by the time they reached the Niflheim Empire. The sun broke through and lit the horizon brimmed with gorgeous beaches and a purpled mountain range stretching from north to south. If Prompto were not dehydrated, he could have cried in happiness.

As if the boat had been equipped with the exact amount of fuel yet again, the engine sputtered as Ignis slowed them into Succarpe’s dusty port. It died completely several hundred yards away, and they drifted the remaining distance to a pier within a dozen docked freighters. 

Many of the dock hands did not speak the same language as them. When Ignis approached several, asking for directions to the train station, most stared at him puzzled. He eventually forewent the matter and indicated for the others to follow him into the heart of the unnamed Succarpian port town, leaving the boat where it drifted against the dock struts. After further inquiry in town, Ignis ably exchanged words with a polite older man who happily pointed them in the right direction.

To their relief, no Imperial soldiers patrolled the town, but on two separate occasions customs officers stopped them and asked for proof of papers. With the knowledge of the state of Lucis, refugees were not being turned away as they would have been any other time. On both occasions, Aura said her papers were lost in Lestallum during the attack. The group didn’t once bring up Noctis’ royal status, as the act held too much danger, so he too followed Aura’s example to explain his papers’ absence. They were both waved through as unnamed refugees.

As they walked through the hot and dusty streets, Aura held Prompto’s hand. He didn’t shake her away, as he enjoyed every lingering contact she gave more than he should, but many times he didn’t understand why she touched him so often. Especially when touch was not an experience he had much of in his short lifetime. It was never sought after, but simultaneously, it was never unwanted. Darker parts of his thoughts believed she did it because she was exhausted. He laced his fingers within hers as they dutifully followed Ignis.

When they reached the train station, the vast cathedral structure of the Transcontinental Line was far more beautiful than the slummy port town surrounding it. Prompto believed he stepped into an alternate dimension underneath the glass-refracted afternoon light onto metro grays and whites. A heaven resembling the better parts of Insomnia.

Only by the divine will of the Hexatheon, the last train of the afternoon whistled in final passengers. Ignis purchased five tickets, one of which he refused Aura’s gil on, and they all boarded one of the railcars from the marbled platform. The moment Prompto stepped through the threshold of air conditioning and muted ambient light, he was two blinks away from falling asleep on his feet.

They dropped off their bags into their bunk suite, but paused when they realized the suite only contained four bunks. Aura didn’t put up a fight when she plucked the odd ticket out of Ignis’ hand and left to find her cabin. Prompto couldn’t contain the disappointment.

They awaited for their tickets to be stamped by the attendant before fully situating. When the train lurched from the station, hissing steam underneath their tread, they all took turns at the showers in the small lavatories. When it came to Prompto’s turn to shower, he scrubbed at every inch of his skin violently, knowing he still reeked from when he was unable to bathe in the Maidenwater properly. The showerhead itself had little pressure, couldn’t reach a hot enough temperature, and was barely tall enough for him to duck his head under. He snickered at the thought of Gladio’s angst when it would be the big guy’s turn. 

While Prompto washed with the drying soap the train provided, his thoughts drifted to Aura. On the boat across the ocean, she had been more open and relaxed, as if the faintness of starvation, dehydration, and exhaustion caused her to become a different person. She had said a lot of funny things that didn’t make sense, as they all had underneath their fatigue, but with every bit of sarcasm and wit she pulled, she became more charming in Prompto’s eyes. She laughed at his stupid jokes, and he laughed at hers, though hers were all anti-jokes and puns and far worse than his.

When they slept, in what disjointed sleep they gathered, she didn’t vary the way she slept. Mostly she slept alone in a fetal position, though at one point, she had slept in his lap. When she had nestled her head against his thigh, her hair draped precariously over his crotch, he had to think of depressing, ugly things to keep his erection down until she fell asleep. Absentmindedly, he had trailed his fingers through the ends of her hair until he had eventually succumbed to sleep himself. 

Prompto inhaled the steam of the shower. The water relaxed him, and was just warm enough to penetrate into sore muscles he didn’t even know he had. He let it fall across his face, thankful for some peace at last. His last attempt at bathing had not been as calming. 

A sudden, intrusive thought of Aura swimming in the Maidenwater flashed in his head.

He felt hot and cold in the same breath, his cock twitching to life as he remembered how she saw him naked and prepared to strip herself of her own clothes to jump in the river.

Then, without consent, the memory of her sliding down her pants in the caravan joined it. The slope of her breasts filling her black bra at the Leiden campsite entered his head soon after.

Her head in his lap, and his fingers in her hair.

When she leaned over the top of him, telling him he had a nice body.

When she straddled him in the desert, and kissed him.

The exquisite taste of her mouth.

The warm water dripping down his body loosened some muscles, but tightened others. He felt his blood rushing, and had no desire to fight it. He liked her. More than he ever liked Cindy, even after his incessant pining for the bubbly mechanic for months. More than any old girlfriend from school. Aura made him feel like he was a real person worthy of affection. She also seemed to enjoy his personality without shame. She was carefree in every sense of the word, as she rolled with the punches life endlessly threw at her. She made him desire happiness again.

But regardless of how he looked at her, he doubted she looked at him the same way.

The hot blood in his body met the surface of his skin, and he groaned. He had a minute. Thinking of Aura—an alluring girl he had only met almost a month ago—he reached down and wrapped his fingers around his hardened length. He didn’t bother with the soap, knowing its cheapness would only irritate him. Heated underneath the intimate thoughts of Aura’s bare body, he made short work of himself as he pumped steadily. Pleasure mounted at the base of his spine, and the muscles in his pelvis contracted. 

His orgasm came quickly and explosively. He bit his lip to stifle his groan as he shot into the running water, thrusting a few last times along his palm. He inhaled and exhaled deep, numbed in body and mind and finally relieved of a build-up he had been experiencing for a long time. But the need for satiation still lingered. His eyes shut tight as he contained himself despite the reeling of his head. He washed his last remaining parts and turned the faucets off.

If he wasn’t exhausted before, he was beyond it now.

When he dried and returned to the room, a dozen bottled waters were left in a box on the floor beside their bags. Prompto grabbed one and drank it in seconds. Without protest, he climbed into one of the top bunks. Noctis already secured the other top bunk across the little space between them, and he slept noisily facing the wall. Ignis was nowhere to be seen, and Gladio sat on the bottom bunk below Noctis, his head in his hands. Eventually, he left for the showers himself.

Prompto laid his head back against a starchy pillow, thankful for some comfort in the rising chaos over the last couple weeks. His face felt hot, though hot in different ways beside temperature. The cool of the sheets calmed him, but not enough. When Aura’s toned body invaded his thoughts again, he chalked it up to fatigue and dehydration, and pushed her out of his mind. He couldn’t deny he wanted to think about her. He wanted to pleasure himself to her again. But now was not the time. His body needed to recover. He created constellations out of the porous underside of the ceiling before his eyelids closed a final time, and he drifted off to much needed sleep.

* * * * *

_The blonde girl wanted to try it again. Prompto found it terrifying, remembering how well their attempt went the last time. The procedure was too painful to want to look at one another. But he was willing to try anything. Especially with her._

_A technician called out his number. He stilled in the corner of the glass chamber, knees trembling against his chest. His glass door hissed open, and a second technician gestured him out. If he didn’t comply, they would kill him. He had seen it enough times with the other boys and girls, and somehow, they were always easily replaced from a surplus of other children._

_He lay on the metal table—its surface still warm from the last boy. Ice prickled his skin as they strapped the plastic restraints across his limbs. His eyes stung, and his mouth dried. But it was going to work this time. It had to._

_The V-shaped needle pierced the scar tissue in the bend of Prompto’s arm and popped through, sliding into his vein. The needle felt deeper than usual. As the technician taped the needle down, his tears descended. They slipped from his eyes into his hair, and he turned his head to find the girl’s chamber._

_She sat at the forefront of the glass, hands pressed against it. He focused on her eyes as the machines began. And that was all he saw. He memorized their upturned squint in her smile, their color in the sterility of the room, and the way they saw into every part of him. She seemed at peace as together they imagined—as the acidic fire slipped into his arm from the needle—holding hands for the first time._

Prompto’s own tears woke him from his fitful slumber. He blinked awake to moonlit darkness and felt the stickiness in his eyelashes and the sides of his temple and nose. He wiped the tears away and turned to face the suite. A small window let in the cool glow of the night to light the floor between their bunks. All three of the other bunks were occupied by his friend’s sleeping forms. Noctis appeared to have not budged, and Gladio uncomfortably wedged himself into the small bunk below him, his legs partially draped over the edge. Below Prompto, Ignis slept on top of his covers, as he seemed too exhausted to care.

Quietly, Prompto climbed from the top bunk to the floor, questioning the time. He pulled up his phone, as this was his first opportunity in a while to charge it, along with the battery for his camera. Still the wee hours of the morning, and a few left to go before sunrise. His nightmares made him more tired, and he didn’t understand why lately they seemed to be increasing in frequency. Perhaps he worked too hard to repress them, and now that his body slid into physical exhaustion more often than not, his mind couldn’t work the overtime. He put his phone back down, then pulled a clean shirt from his bag over his head. He left the suite into the dark hallway, sliding the door closed behind him.

The dining car lay empty to his expectations. The bar’s liquors were locked behind a glass case, but he sat down at the bar regardless. The leather seat felt stiff, as if it had never been used. He watched the savanna of Succarpe slide past the window through the mirror. Wide, acacia trees and rocky pillars underneath moonlight reminded him of a more uninhabitable Leide. Ignis reminded them one of the Royal Arms lay nearby in Cartanica, but Prompto had difficulty imagining anything of value being in such a location.

A sigh escaped him. He rubbed the tired from his eyes before dropping his face into his hand. The vibrations of the train beneath his feet lulled him, despite the churning of his nightmare still fresh in his head.

“Hey, there.”

Her soft voice soothed his soul in two short breaths. He dropped his hand and turned to see Aura standing at the end of the bar. Modesty never seemed to be a thought she considered, as she was dressed in her black shorts, and was braless beneath her white tanktop. As much as he wanted to look, he ignored everything below her chin and kept his eyes on hers.

“Can I join you?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, of course.”

She approached him and sat on the barstool beside him, pulling her hair out of her way and over her shoulder. At the quick sight of her bare neck without its dozens of necklaces, his breathing hitched. He thanked the Astrals any blushing could not be seen in the dark.

“Sleep well?”

He shook his head. “I-I don’t often sleep well.”

“How come?”

He intertwined his fingers together on the bar. “Nightmares.”

“Ah.” She propped her chin up with her fist. “Can I ask what your nightmares are about?”

Prompto’s prevalent ache burned heavily in his heart. He knew he would die of heart failure one day because of it, and yet he could think of no way to make it disappear. “Just…bad things.”

“Would you rather not talk about it?”

He couldn’t talk about it even if he wanted to. “It’s hard to. S-so…”

“It’s okay,” she reassured. “I understand.”

“But…thank you though.” He pinched his hands together harder. “What about you?”

“Same. Too light of a sleeper to ever get any good from it.”

“Bunkmates giving you trouble?”

"Actually my suite is empty. So I get four beds all to myself.”

“Pfft. Lucky.”

“Not really. I can still hear the people snoring in the cabin next to mine. The walls are paper thin. So no sleep for me.”

A hum sounded in his throat. He gestured toward the locked cabinet. “Too bad it’s locked. A hard one always puts me to sleep.”

She laughed softly. “Damn. You’re right. I could use one myself to erase that boat ride from my memory.”

An impulse propelled through him. “We should make it a date then,” he blurted out before he could stop himself.

She turned to stare at him, her lips parted slightly. “What?”

Part of him wanted to feel nervous, but a stronger part of him wanted to return to the absolute comfort her presence seemed to bestow. He swallowed away his apprehension. “Yeah. You and me. Tomorrow night. Or…tonight. I forget what day it is.”

Another laugh, and its sound filled him with ecstasy. “You’re asking me to have a drink with you?”

Anxiety tried to rear up, so he spoke before it caused him doubt. He was glad for the darkness, as she couldn’t see his subtle trembling. “A-absolutely. So, you wanna?”

She smiled. “All right, Sunshine. It’s a date.”

“It won’t…bother you, will it?”

“Why would it?”

“You know. Because of…well…your past…or at least, a certain person…” He prayed she would gather the hint before he said the word he wanted to avoid.

“Oh.” She paused to think. “No, I’m okay. And I think he would be okay with it, too. He was a sincere person when he wanted my happiness.”

“That’s good.” Then it was his turn to pause. “Hold up. Are you saying having drinks with me would make you happy?”

To his astonishment, she bit the corner of her lip and turned her face away slightly. 

_Wait. Is that…?_

“Are…are you blushing?” Again, it seemed within her presence in the darkness, he had no filter. But at the prospect of seeing the freckled skin across her cheeks redden, it lit a fire inside him that could only be described as pure sunlight.

“What? Gods, no.” But she didn’t look directly at him. “I don’t blush.”

“Really?” He felt cheeky. “Did I embarrass you?”

She opened her mouth to reply, then cut her eyes at him. She said that exact line in the caravan in Hammerhead when she stripped in front of him.

He leaned toward her, continuing. “It’s okay to say I did.”

“Oh, you’re funny,” she said instead.

“Don’t forget cute,” he added with a grin. “I mean, that is the word you used.”

“Listen to you!” She shoved at his shoulder. “It’s called humility, you know.”

“Hey, I’m just repeating what you said.”

Her lovely laughter sounded genuine. “Well, you are.”

Anxiety returned full throttle as his knee bounced slightly. “Wait…y-you…you think I am?”

But again, she turned her head to the side as if to hide her facial expression. In the mirror, he glimpsed the darkening of her cheeks overtop her smile. His chest pounded frantically like an overbeaten drum at the sight. She forced her smile away to a casual expression and turned back to face him.

“You know, I haven’t gotten any good sleep and I really should try again before everyone wakes up.” She slid off the barstool, but didn’t move to leave.

“Yeah, I should probably do the same.” Though he hated to admit it, he needed the rest, despite his larger desire to remain in her presence. They stared at one another for a second, too anxious to say anything more but not wanting to stop.

“Good night, Sunshine,” she said before she turned and headed back to the cabins.

“Good morning, Shadows,” he called after her.

She paused in the threshold of the doorway, turning back to give him a final smile, and left.

When he returned to his suite to get another hour of sleep himself, all memories of his earlier nightmare disappeared completely.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For all your fluffy needs. Don't get used to it.

The following day on the train was spent mostly in rest and repair. Ignis slept, and slept even more. Whenever he rose to eat, he usually returned to the suite afterward to sleep. Noctis remained in a quiet daze himself, and Gladiolus passed the time in his books and questionable magazines.

Prompto spent the time parading through the photos on his camera—pausing often on the one photo Aura and he had taken together—and on the occasion, pulling up King’s Knight on his phone to pass the time. An emergency signal had returned out of bounds of Lucis, albeit the smallest signal available, but it was enough for Gladiolus to send a message to his younger sister Iris, and Noctis to send ones to both his father and Cor Leonis. Iris replied back almost instantly, happy to know everyone was alive. King Regis and the Marshal, however, had yet to return Noctis’ messages. It brought a new concern to the group, and to Noctis especially, that no one wanted to voice.

The dining car served dinner at four o’clock, and though at any other time, Prompto would have considered that too early to beginning drinking, his eagerness was difficult to contain. What time he spent in Aura’s presence thus far was nothing more than small snatches here and there between bigger events. Now, he was presented with an opportunity to talk to her without distractions, and it set his nerves alight.

When four o’clock passed, he dressed in the cleanest, most presentable outfit he owned—black pants with a plain, gray tee, as it was quickly becoming his new favorite color—and left the suite. He walked the remainder of the hallway to the next cabin car, and through the next, until he stopped just outside the dining car. He gathered his wits, combing his fingers through the hair above his ears, and told himself over and over this was nothing more than dinner and drinks. They would simply talk. Nothing crazy. 

Prompto entered the dining car and slid the door closed behind him. He walked down the aisle between booths toward the bar, but slowed when he saw ahead in an occupied booth, Gladiolus sat next to Aura, talking as they faced away. His veins iced over. He ducked into a booth several behind them, and pressed the back of his head against the cushion.

“You had to have learned somewhere,” Gladio asked in a softer voice than Prompto was used to hearing. “I trained my whole life to be as good as I am.”

“No, I trained myself,” she said. “That bug you?”

“A bit, yeah. No one is _naturally_ that good. Not even the Immortal.”

“Who?”

“Cor Leonis, Marshal of the Crownsguard. He’s unbeatable, but if you ever meet him, don’t call him the Immortal. He doesn’t like it.”

“Reminds him he’s outlived others?”

Gladio snorted. “Yeah. That sounds right.”

“Kinda don’t blame him.”

“Back on subject, I’m curious about you. Maybe that’s why you piss me off so much.”

“Clever way to charm a girl, Gladio.”

He chuckled. “I don’t want to use the line, ‘you’re not like other girls’, but…you’re not like other girls.”

Prompto felt his heart stop cold in his chest before it started back up at a frantic pace.

“Thank you, I suppose,” she said, “but I do have to tell you no two girls are alike.”

Gladio’s nervousness sounded deafening. “Because you’re…I don’t know. You’re strong, and you don’t take shit from anyone. I’ve never had anyone really stand up to me like that in Cape Shawe, much less a girl. Most people are too afraid to cross me.”

“You like stroking your own ego there?”

He chuckled again. “Hey, I’m tough. You have to admit that.”

“I think all four of you are tough in your own rights. Yours just happens to be a physical one.”

“And is that something you like?”

“What? Like, do I like physical toughness?”

“No, I mean…is me being tough something you _like_?”

Prompto wanted desperately to stand from the booth and leave. He didn’t want to hear anymore. This whole date thing was stupid, and a mistake. Yet part of him still wanted to remain and listen in unruly optimism.

“Something I like? You mean…?”

Silence followed.

“Oh.” Aura chuckled in response. “Oh. That.”

“Sorry, I guess I’m terrible at this.”

“Oh, goodness, no. It’s just that…I’m already taken.”

Now Prompto wished he had just walked away. He drummed his fingers against the edge of the empty table in front of him to keep from chewing his nails.

“Really?” Gladio asked.

“Yes, really.”

“How often do you see them? Because you’ve yet to mention anyone.”

“I’ve kept most things about me quiet for a reason.” She hesitated. “But…I have a husband.”

Prompto dropped his head and rest his chin on his chest, pushing the burn in his eyes away.

_Serves you right, anyway. You’re not anybody to her._

“Wow. You’re married?” Gladio paused. “What’s he like?”

Prompto tensed, preparing to stand and take his leave.

“You’re going to laugh.”

“Try me,” he said.

Prompto lifted from the table.

“I don’t remember.”

Prompto dropped back down.

“I’m sorry, what?” Gladio asked. “You don’t remember your own husband?”

A long silence followed. “I didn’t have too happy of a past,” she said. “I’ve kind of repressed some of the memories tied to him.”

“And you can’t tell me anything about him?”

“Well…” Another awkward hesitation. “Your friend Prompto reminds me of him.”

An ache Prompto didn’t understand stretched his ribcage as he collapsed inward.

“Ah. I get it now,” Gladio said with an uncomfortable laugh. “That’s why you can’t seem to be away from him.”

“That’s not entirely true,” she explained. “I like him for a lot of reasons.”

“So you…really…like him?”

She hesitated. “All right, big guy. Off with you now.”

“You pushing me out?”

“Yes, because Prompto and I are going to have drinks. It’s kind of a two-person thing, too.”

The tiniest of smiles lifted at the corners of Prompto’s lips.

“Really?” Gladio grunted. “Oh, okay. Want me to go fetch your knight in shining leather then?”

“No need to insinuate. But if you see him, yes.”

The stretch of fabric let Prompto know Gladio stood up from the booth. Prompto dashed out of his booth and casually headed toward the bar as if he had just showed up. To his luck, Gladio didn’t notice.

“Hey, big guy!” he said cheerily as Gladio walked toward him. “You gonna stay and eat?”

“Nah, I ate a big lunch. Maybe later.” Gladio paused, as if he wanted to say something to Prompto.

Prompto’s eyebrow hiked. “Hey, you okay, man?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Just…be good.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re lucky, but I’m telling you to be good.” Gladio gave one firm clap on Prompto’s shoulder. “I’m going to go read. Or something.”

Prompto watched him go, seeing the effects of Aura’s rejection on the Prince’s Shield. He suddenly trembled, afraid of the same response. 

Unless Gladio was warning Prompto about her husband.

_You’re only having drinks. That’s all._

Nervously, he ordered two Altissian white wines and glanced at Aura in the booth. She stared out the window at the passing savanna scenery, unaffected by the conversations of others around her. Even in doing nothing she seemed so serene. He took a deep breath and brought the drinks over to her booth. He sat the drinks down on the table and dropped in the seat across from her. When she saw him, she smiled, and he melted all over again.

“Thought it was time to start, despite how early it is,” he said, chuckling.

“It’s never too early for me,” she said as she lifted the glass in salute. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

They clinked glasses. The crystallized wine tasted of raisins and green apples, and felt soothing to a sore stomach. Prompto gulped down more of his wine than perhaps necessary, but his nervousness knew no bounds. He hoped the social lubricant would make conversation come easier.

“You even ordered one I like,” she said over the rim of her glass.

“Well, you know, you mumble a lot in your sleep, so I learned quite a bit from you on the boat ride. And you specifically requested Altissian imported.”

“Good to know I was at least accurate while unconscious.” She took another sip. “So, there’s something that I’ve been dying to know.”

He took another unnecessary swallow of wine. “Um…okay. Shoot.”

“Your name. Argentum?”

“Yes?”

“Prompto Argentum?”

“Again, yes.”

“As in, the element silver?” 

“Uh…yeah.”

“So…your name…is _Quicksilver_?”

A heat, having nothing to do with the wine, spread across his cheeks. “Uh, yeah. That’s right.”

She narrowed her gaze at him. “What on Eos were your parents thinking?”

“Actually, I got to name myself.”

Her jaw dropped. “I don’t believe you.”

“Yeah. When I was eight.” He ignored the ache in his chest. “Kind of a birthday present from my parents.”

“What were you named before?”

“I…don’t want to say.” 

_I didn’t have one._

“Wow, that’s amazing. So why _Quicksilver_?”

“Makes me believe I’m faster than I am.”

_Because I wasn’t fast enough before._

Something dark shifted in her features before she nervously smiled and took another sip of wine. “Ah. Okay.”

“So, yeah, another secret you know about me, and yet I can’t seem to pry anything out of you. So unfair.” He shook his head in mock jest. “So I’ll ask…what about your name?”

“What about it?”

“Aura Creperum? You named yourself. You had to have.”

She sighed. “I wish I could tell you my parents gave it to me or it was my grandmother’s or something sentimental like that, but yeah…I named myself.”

“Hold on, I want to decipher this.” Prompto steepled his fingers together and stared at her, watching her eyebrow lift slightly at him. “Light. And dark?”

“A light in the darkness,” she said.

“Wow.” A smile peaked on his face. “I like it.”

“Thank you,” she mouthed, taking an unsure sip of her wine.

“Why that name?”

She shrugged. “Sounded hopeful. Something you seek when you’re lost and alone.”

Prompto paused before softly saying, “Yours sounds like it has a lot attached to it.”

“Yeah, it kinda does.”

His smile deepened, hoping to give her some reassurance. “I won’t ask then.”

“Maybe…maybe someday I’ll tell you.”

“I’d like that. But for right now, it’s still not enough. We know each other’s names…something we probably should have done when we first met…but I need something else.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Something you don’t tell other people. Like a secret.”

She narrowed her eyes and stared at him for a second before blurting out, “I secretly hate dessert.”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s a secret,” she explained. “I don’t tell anyone because they look at me like you’re looking at me right now, as if I’ve grown a second head or something.”

He chuckled. “Okay, first off, that’s not a secret, that’s a really weird, really messed up quirk. And second, how on Eos can you not like sweets? I mean, c’mon! Chocolate, pastries, cake… _ice cream_?”

She shook her head, enjoying his disbelief. “I never have. I simply don’t enjoy it.”

“Weirdo.”

She scoffed. “ _You’re_ weird, naming yourself _Quicksilver_.”

“It is entirely normal to love desserts, and I don’t trust anyone who says otherwise.”

“Hard to build a relationship without trust,” she lilted over the rim of her glass. “Your turn again.”

He narrowed his eyes before cutting them away out the window. “Nope. You have a lot of ground to cover, and I’ve shared more than enough.”

“It’s a game now?”

“You owe me at least three more things I don’t know about you. That should cover my love of photography, my phobias I told you about in the caravan, and…oh, when I briefly explained my upbringing in Insomnia.”

“Briefly? It was hardly a sentence.”

“I’m counting it.”

She crossed her arms. “Excuse you, but I’ve shared equally enough. I’ve told you about being homeless and alone, I showed you my Magitek gloves, which may or may not be illegal, and I revealed to you I was once married. And now you know my hatred for dessert. If anything, it’s your turn whether or not you want to admit it.”

“Fine.” He wrinkled his nose, wanting to pout. “I was once a fat kid.”

“You? Fat?”

“Not just kinda fat either. I mean...” In dramatic display, he puffed his cheeks and patted the air around an invisible belly.

“But you’re so lean.”

“I worked really hard at losing the weight. Putting the pounds on was easy—I had no self-worth. Getting rid of the pounds though was torture. I had to eat so many vegetables. Like, soooo many! And run, too. Gods, I hate running.”

Her lovely laugh soothed his nerves further than the wine already had.

“Well, maybe if you didn’t love dessert so much, it wouldn’t have been a problem.”

His mouth dropped. “Hey!”

“I know, I’m a bitch.”

His smile faltered. “I didn’t say that!”

“You did in Lestallum.”

“Oh, yeah.” His smile completely dropped. “I-I am sorry about calling you that. I was just really hurt.”

“Hey, I’m kidding,” she said, lightly touching Prompto’s hand on the table. His skin tingled underneath the graze of her fiery fingertips. “It’s really okay. I _was_ being a bitch.”

“You know, you did have every right to yell at me. I _was_ stalking you.”

“Speaking of which, I never had the chance to ask.” She crossed her arms. “Actually, I did ask, but you chose not to answer. Why were you wearing my dog tag?”

A heat rose in his skin, and he felt himself blushing all over his body. He nervously scratched the hair behind his ear. 

She noticed. “You’re stalling.”

“No, I’m just…well, maybe a little.” He sighed. “I, uh…don’t really know.”

“It was my dog tag. Typically they go to family members. How did you get it, and why did you keep it, let alone wear it?”

“You dropped it from your neck when you…well…in Hammerhead. But I’m not a hundred percent sure why I wore it.”

“That makes zero percent sense.”

"I know, it’s a little strange.” He shrugged. “I have an inkling why, but…if I tell you…you promise not to get mad or judge me or anything?”

“Um, I won’t promise anything, but I’ll hear you out.”

He inhaled deep. “I kept your dog tag because I was lonely. I’ve been lonely for a long time. And I don’t mean, I have no friends, because I do. I mean…I have _nobody_.” He opened his hands, palm up. “You know?”

“Like, a girlfriend?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess. Just a companion. A person who would understand me and I them. And then I saw you, and you seemed just as lonely. You didn’t talk to Takka when he tried to talk to you. You didn’t try to get to know us at the caravan. You left the next morning before saying anything. It all felt so sad. And I couldn’t help but get drunk that night over my own loneliness, and you stumbled out from the dark, and it felt like we had both come from our own darks to meet in the middle.” His hands trembled, and he folded them over each other flat on the table to keep from moving. “But you were hurt. I don’t know why you being hurt affected me so much. I barely know you. It really messed me up, seeing you like that. It made me realize how short life really is. So I wore it to remind myself to keep going, even if it was only for the little moments. A polite smile from a stranger, or the brush of someone’s shoulder. It helped me not be so alone. I wore it, hoping in the littlest way, you wouldn’t be so alone either.” He tensed his shoulders. “I’m sorry if that sounds weird.”

She didn’t say anything as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth.

He didn’t want to say it, but it needed to be said. “And lastly, I wore it because you remind me of someone.”

She released her lip, now rosy. “I do? Who?”

His face softened. “Someone who was very important to me once. That’s all I can really say.”

She stared at him for a few seconds. “That’s funny.”

“My explanation?”

“No, not that. Your explanation was profound. It makes a lot of sense to me. Actually…it makes me feel good.”

He smiled, but only slightly. “So, what was the funny part then?”

“Because you remind me of my husband.”

Prompto couldn’t be sure if he should be pleased or hurt, especially since he had heard that very confession to Gladio moments before. His knee bounced underneath the table. “Oh. Okay. Is that good or bad?”

“A bit of both. I’m not going to lie—it’s a warm feeling every time I see your face, but it breaks my heart as well.”

He swallowed, tense over his next question. “Is…is that the only reason you hang around me?”

Her face fell. “Why would you think that?”

“Why wouldn’t I think that?”

“Oh Gods, of course not,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve left that impression and made you think that.”

His voice lowered, unsure. “T-then why do you hang around me?”

Aura’s eyes sparkled with a life Prompto had never seen before. The gray in them suddenly took on every color in the room. “Because you’re you, Prompto. You have this unbridled optimism I have never seen in anyone before. You’re incredibly kind and generous, and you’re smarter than you let on. You work hard at making others happy. You care about others wholeheartedly, even putting them before you. Even when I was a complete stranger, you did more for me than others I’ve known much longer. You offered me a caravan bunk the moment we met.”

“N-no, Noct offered it to you.”

She smirked. “No, _you_ did. He asked, but you were the one who initiated the idea. I heard you guys talking outside the diner.” A small hesitation. “Actually, it was the only reason I agreed to stay the night. Because it was nice to have someone care about my well-being for once.”

His heart brightened. “Wait, _I’m_ the reason you said yes?”

A small blush reddened across her cheeks. She didn’t turn to hide it. “Yeah. You were.”

His heart began thumping. He didn’t know what to say, or if he should say anything.

_Tell her how you feel about her._

“Uh, I need a refill,” he said in a small voice. He grabbed her empty glass and his and rushed back over to the bar, leaving her in the booth alone.

As the bartender pulled the chilled wine bottle from the ice below him, Prompto shook his hands out of Aura’s periphery. They tingled with numbness, and he could barely breathe. It was as if two versions of himself fought for control—the version of him that flexed up and became nervous speaking to girls, and the version of him that softened and found comfort speaking to Aura. If he could speak the truth, he had only felt this kind of comfort with one other girl in his life.

The bartender handed the filled wine glasses back to Prompto. He took them and returned to the booth, shaking slightly as he placed them down. When he glanced up at her, the thumping in his heart amplified. He gathered in the rosiness of her lips and the brightness of her cheekbones. He sat back down and fingered the stem of the wine glass.

“You okay, Sunshine?”

“Yeah, just…fine.”

_Do it now. Tell her how you feel._

She smiled small. “And you call me the liar.”

“Yeah, I know.” He glanced up at her again as she took a swallow of her wine. The press of her lips against the glass stirred all the emotions from his shower the day before, and suddenly he felt like his shame and guilt displayed openly on his hot face. He laughed uneasily.

“What?” she asked.

“N-nothing.” He swallowed the knot in his throat. “I can’t really tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I would die of embarrassment.” A sip of cool wine, and a deep breath. “Look, c-can I say something?”

“I would want you to.”

He nodded. “Aura, I-I…”

_She has a husband._

He stopped before he began, lingering on that one fact—those four words—whirling through his head.

_She has a husband._

Despite not remembering much about her husband, she remembered enough to mention him on several occasions. She remembered enough to compare Prompto to this other man. And to cause more complications, she wasn’t sure if he was still alive or not. If her husband truly left her, like she told Prompto in the tent at the Maidenwater, she wouldn’t bring him up like he was still a tangible, viable part of her existence. In the end, it wouldn't matter what Prompto felt about her. His words stopped in his throat, unable to flow forward.

She stared at him, her gray eyes dazzling with the same color from earlier, waiting.

“I…really hope…your husband is still alive,” he said.

Her face slowly fell, erased of a hundred comforted and happy emotions to one of nothingness. Her eyes blanked of their color. “Oh. Yeah. Thank you.”

“I’m saying, he’s lucky to have a girl like you so dedicated to him. And you deserve to find him again, if he is still out there.”

And that was it. Those were the words that became her undoing. The darkness she donned when he first met her in Takka’s diner reemerged, changing her face from a storm to a stone. She blinked, cool, collected, tired.

“I’m…I’m sorry, Aura. I just thought if I…”

She lifted her hand up quickly to silence him. “No. Really. It’s okay.”

He regretted every word in an instant. “Don’t do that. Please. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Prompto, you’re right to stop me. I don’t deserve to be selfish.”

“W-what…what does that mean?”

She downed the rest of her wine. “It means what it means.” She stood from the table, her necklaces clinking like little wind chimes against her breastbone. “Thank you for the drinks.”

“Aura, wait.” He stood quickly, grabbing her wrist above her turquoise wristlet. “Just answer me. What do you mean, be selfish?”

“Because you’re right. If he is still out there, I’m letting him down every minute I spend not looking for him.” She flicked her weary gaze back up to him. “Including spending time with other men.”

His brow furrowed. He desperately wanted to erase what he said, but at the same time, her words rang some sad degree of truth. He gently released her wrist. His fingers slid along the aluminum rim of the wristlet as she pulled away from him. He watched her walk away, his heart thumping against every brittle rib. When she stopped in the middle of the aisle, her hands draped against the two booths at her side, a hope brimmed inside for a second. But before she could leave, or turn around, and before he could call her back one more time, the world around them exploded.

The train screamed an animalistic cry in screeching, shaking metal. The cabin rocked, throwing every panicked passenger to the carpeted floor. Several screamed. The entire cabinet of liquors lurched forward in one ear-shattering explosion across the bar. Prompto flew down the aisle ten feet, catching against another booth, when all the cabin lights blacked out.

In the gingery afternoon light filtering in through the cracked windows, Prompto saw Aura lying in a heap against the door at the far end. She struggled to lift herself up, having been thrown the entire length of the cabin. Her dark hair fell in a curtain around her face. 

He called out to her as he tried to stand to shaking legs. She turned her face up, a thin line of blood trailing from her nose, and found him in the chaos.

When the train exploded a second time, Prompto’s world fell into darkness.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear my own heart stops a little every time I upload a chapter, and I have to take a deep breath to prepare myself to hit 'Post'.
> 
> This one hurt.

_“Will you remember me?” she asked in a small voice. “When we become monsters?”_

_“When we become monsters, you will be all I remember.”_

Prompto peeled his eyes open from the black, spinning world to one made of blood and glass. His bleeding hand lay in front of him. Beneath it spread a splayed spider web of glass cracks. He moaned underneath the pressure of the fiercest headache he ever experienced. A wind whistled across the shell of his ear and through his hair. Cries surrounded him, cutting in and fading out like static audio underneath the groan of something giant and metal. A scream pierced the air before it faded away to nothingness.

Gods, he hurt. Bad.

He blinked away the burn in his eyes and lifted his head slightly. All he could see were warped metal frames. And glass. 

Windows. 

He blinked again. 

He was lying on the windows.

The dismantling of metal beneath heavy thuds vibrated the frame around him. Faraway, he distinctly heard the familiar _pop-pop-pop_ of gunfire.

Prompto braced himself and pulled his bleeding hand in underneath him. It stung across the back, leaking sticky blood underneath his leather wristband. He pushed himself up and dropped his head, but when he saw below him, his breath caught in his throat.

For hundreds of feet—open air before the face of the dusty, savanna earth. The dining car lay sideways off the bridge tracks. The rest of the train beyond the dining car, including the sleeping cabins, also lay off the tracks, descending down like a segmented insect pulled apart by a sadistic child. On the ground, next to a rushing river underneath the white train bridge, sat the smoldering remains of the train’s rear car.

If the sight wasn’t enough to make him want to heave, the sight of dozens of dead passengers littering the ground like discarded human paperwads was. Ahead of him, hanging from one of the windows of the next cabin, a suspended woman clung to the frame. Prompto struggled to rise to hurry to her, but before he could lift so much as an inch, her fingers slipped. She screamed the entire length of her plummet, landing with a faraway thud next to the smoldering train car. His heart stopped for several seconds as he stared at her body down below.

He pushed himself up further, cracking glass beneath his weight. He used the car’s ceiling and its popped light fixtures to climb out of the long pocket of windows he had fallen into. His knees trembled in pain, and he was sure he was bleeding from a head wound. He groaned, shaking under the impact, and climbed up and crawled across the mounted booths and tables.

Prompto knew why the train exploded without being told. Despite their wariness and care at escorting Noctis through Succarpe and onto the train, this was Niflheim’s continent, and his friend was a Prince. A Prince who escaped several messy assassination attempts. At this point, Prompto knew the Empire was desperate enough to target innocent civilians, as they had in Lestallum. Perhaps the man who directed them to the boat in Cape Shawe set this trap. Perhaps the man knew what would happen once Noctis reached Niflheim.

As Crownsguard, Prompto’s priority should have been to reach Noctis. As his best friend, he cared enough to want to find him without anyone forcing his hand. But someone else, in a muddled way he loved and hated, pulled at him even more.

“Aura?” he cried out in a strained voice. “Aura!”

No answer. Several passengers around him, tucked into booths, sobbed in response. He wanted to help them, but he had no idea where he could safely send them. Where they sat in corners was as safe a place as he could imagine.

He reached the end of the booths and cautiously climbed down against the frame of the open emergency door. Vertigo tried to rear up inside him when he looked down, but he swallowed it and braced himself against the light fixtures in the ceiling. His heart pounded when he remembered Aura being thrown against the cabin doors, and now the exit doors were broken open. He stared down, praying to the Astrals he would not see her body on the ground below.

“Aura!” he called again. His voice disappeared with the passing wind beneath his feet. A couple tears burned the undersides of his bottom lids, but he tried again. And again. He heard no response save for the few survivors around him who begged for his help.

Panic began to rush like a river through his body. His extremities tingled with numbness and his breathing shortened. He couldn’t feel his own heartbeat anymore. 

“Prompto?”

Though the voice was not Aura’s, it was the next best thing.

“Noct!” he cried out, glancing around. “Oh, thank the Gods. Are you okay, Buddy?”

“Barely. Where are you?”

Prompto struggled from his position against the emergency door frame. “I-I’m in the dining car. I can’t see you.”

“Straight ahead. Look up.”

He did through a crack in the cabin frame. Perhaps twenty feet away in one of the previous cabins, Noctis had himself braced in one of the busted windows, his face bruised red along one cheek and jaw. Ignis stood behind him, awkwardly balancing against a sideways doorframe.

“Where’s Gladio?” Prompto asked.

“I…I don’t know,” Noctis called out, trying not to touch the broken glass around his hands. “I thought he was in the dining car with you.”

“He was awhile ago,” he answered, shaking his head. “But he left to go back to the suite.”

“Is Aura with you?” Ignis asked.

His heart started up again, frantic and desperate, as he thought about her. “N-no. Gods, no. She was. She was right here. But now… I can’t find her, Iggy. I-I can’t—”

“Calm yourself, Prompto. We mustn’t resort to panic,” Ignis said. “We need to find a way out, and get Noct out of here.”

He tightly nodded, shaking through every inch of his body. Regardless of all his preparations and education into the Crownsguard, no amount of training could have equipped him for moments like this.

“I say we go down,” Noctis suggested. “If the Niffs are here, and they know we’re here, they’ll be waiting on the bridge ahead for survivors.”

“Descending could spell danger, as well,” Ignis said, “but we would also have the chance to find Gladiolus and Aura.”

“C-can… can you warp with others, Noct?” Prompto suddenly asked.

Noctis screwed his eyebrows together. “Uh…like, carry someone?”

“Yeah. Yeah! Exactly! Is that possible?”

“I…I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

As if to answer Noctis’ reluctance, a heavy metal groan vibrated the air around them.

“We don’t have the time to contemplate,” Ignis said. “Though it doesn’t sound plausible, it could get us down there quicker.”

“I can’t carry anybody in real life, let alone while I’m warp striking!” he answered with a scoff. “That shit’s exhausting!”

The train groaned again, following by the distant gunfire, and Prompto felt his gravity tipping sideways. He leaned back to compensate, and the emergency door’s frame buckled outward underneath his footing. He slipped, sliding the entire length of his backside against the sharp metal, and fell out into the open air.

_“Prompto!”_

Prompto’s scream strangled in his throat as he reached out around him and grabbed the remaining door frame with both hands. Long red stripes ran on both sides of his forearms, forming bright red pinpricks along the subcutaneous skin. The wind ran by, stinging the exposed flesh, as his legs dangled uselessly beneath him.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Oh, shit, Noct, now would be a really good time to try!”

“I don’t even know where to land! There’s nothing beyond you!”

Prompto forced himself to look down, judging for himself how far away the next car hung. The distance was too far, and though he could potentially land within its split side, he would break every bone in his body. He struggled to pull himself back up through the exit door, but he had nothing beneath his hands for leverage save for the quickly bending doorframe. He couldn’t climb back up.

“Pretty sure I’m gonna fall!” he shouted, his hands weakening against the slick metal. “Uh, have a potion ready for me!”

“Prompto, don’t you fucking dare let go!” Noctis snapped. “Let me come get you!”

The energetic current of Noctis’ warp wisped in the air, and Prompto could hear the resulting thud of him landing inside the dining car. The vibrations of his landing shook through the cabin, and the metal frame shrieked outward in a split second. Prompto’s hands slipped as the metal frame went vertical. 

He plummeted like a stone.

Through his training, he had been taught to go limp in the event of a fall. They had rehearsed the action numerous times with diving boards and pillowed mats in the Citadel. But in the moment, all his training eluded him. No one could mentally prepare for a fall—not even Prompto. His muscles ceased as he braced for impact. He hit, and his body exploded into orgasmic pain. He rolled, hit again, then rolled again. His hands reached out to grab anything, as his eyes could not keep up with the constant movement. He could grab nothing, and soon, he fell again, albeit a shorter distance.

Darkness swallowed him, and he landed with a final thud inside the cabin of the split open train car. His body slacked against a bunk in the corner of the suite, beaten to exhaustion. He tried to raise his head, his dizzying and pounding headache now infinitely worse. A delirious laughter spilled from his lips when he saw his camera several feet away, lying on the wall in front of him.

“Blessed Hexatheon, this is our suite,” he whispered to himself. He dropped his head and groaned.

“Prompto?”

Again, only the next best thing.

“Fuck, Gladio!” he spat, forcing himself up despite the pain and looking around. To his dismay, Gladiolus sat only a few feet from him.

The Shield smiled, two drops of blood at the corner of his mouth. A dislodged bunk had pinned him against the wall.

“Thought you’d just drop in?” he said over his signature smirk.

“Yeah, man, best way to get around,” he muttered, taking in the situation. Gladio’s legs looked useless, askew in such a way they both appeared to be broken. The bunk covered the width of Gladio’s midsection, and only one arm could be seen. Sweat glistened across his brow as he looked ahead with hooded eyes.

“I’m, uh…kinda out of it,” Gladio said, blinking slowly. “Pretty sure something is broken, but I can’t feel what.”

“What, so you boast about your bench pressing skills and you can’t lift a bed?” Prompto tried to joke through a shaking voice. “I’m calling your bluff, you weakling.” He struggled as upright as he could and glanced around, looking for one of the backpacks.

“You know that’s all show,” Gladio responded at a measured pace.

“Yeah, for the ladies, right?” His nervousness sounded deafening as he rifled through the strewn blankets. 

“You. Know it.” Gladio’s voice slowed even more.

Prompto pushed another blanket aside, and found Noctis’ backpack in the corner of the bunk. He ripped it open and dug around in its unorganized contents, feeling happiness overcome him when his fingers closed around a cool, glass bottle of a curative.

“See, only Noctis would have these just lying around in his backpack like they weren’t a big deal.”

A breathy chuckle escaped Gladio’s lips.

“Here, big guy,” he said, dropping low beside him and placing the elixir in his only available hand. Its soft orange light illuminated the shadows of Gladio’s tired face. “Can’t pop it for you.”

Gladio closed his eyes with a small nod, then squeezed his fingers together. The cracking glass disintegrated into the air, and the seeping restorative sunk into his tattooed skin. It took a full minute before its effects revealed. When they did, Gladio opened his eyes again, blinking quickly.

“All right,” he groaned. “Still hurts like hell having this thing on me. Help me out.”

Together, with Prompto pulling and Gladio pushing, they heaved the bunk off Gladio long enough for him to crawl out from the crammed corner. The bunk splintered when they released it against the opposite bunk.

“You need one, too,” Gladio said, nodding at Prompto’s skinned arms as he braced inside the doorframe of the suite.

“I’ll…be all right,” he said, shaking his head. He pulled up his backpack off the ground and piled him camera and phone into it. “Let’s hurry, before this thing falls apart on us.”

The two of them gathered all the supplies they could, even pulling on two backpacks each. Without the Regalia, anything they saved would make the progressing journey that much easier. A sickening thought twisted through Prompto when he considered they might not be able to continue the journey if they didn’t make it off the train.

“Where’s Noctis and Ignis?” Gladio asked when he fully recovered.

Prompto jerked his thumb upward. “U-up there, in one of the other cabins. They’re alive, and okay, I think.”

“And Aura?”

He paused before his heart began to pound again. Immediately he was filled with the regret their last exchange brought, when he stripped the color from her eyes and made her feel selfish about talking to him. His chin quivered.

“I-I…I don’t know.”

“Hey,” Gladio said, clapping his hard hand on Prompto’s shoulder. “It’s okay. We’ll find her. All right?”

Prompto could only nod in response.

“I know what I told you before. How Noctis is first, and all others second.”

“I know. I know.”

“No, Prom, I mean…I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand.”

Gladio grimaced. “It’s okay to care about other people, too. You can have two firsts. Despite your duty, I’m not telling you it’s not okay to want her safety as well.”

Again, he could only nod.

“We won’t leave until we find her, too.”

He smirked. “Thanks, big guy.”

Gladio gave a reassuring nod.

As they had no way to climb upward back toward Noctis and Ignis, they instead decided to descend the segmented insect of the train to the ground below. As most of the train sat on the tracks on the bridge above, they didn’t fear it falling to the ground unless the Imperials intervened.

They dropped carefully into the next sleeping cabin car. In one of the suites, another passenger suffered the same fate as Gladio underneath the impact of a dislodged bunk. The passenger was not as lucky. Prompto averted his gaze as they continued down the near vertical corridor. Prompto grabbed the edge of an open doorway to another suite when something inside caught his eye.

“Hold up, Glad,” he said as he crawled inside, feet against the wall. This suite appeared empty of prior passengers save for a lone black backpack in the corner of one of the bunks. He grabbed it up, and saw a small stitching of a sun on one of the pockets.

“What is it?” Gladio asked from the doorway.

“This is Aura’s bag. This must have been her suite.” He inhaled deep and yelled out her name. No response, so he tried again. Gladio also tried. No one answered them.

Without a second thought, Prompto dropped to his knees and pulled off his backpack. He pulled out his phone, camera, the subsequent chargers, and what little of the supplies he offered to carry from the Regalia. He piled these items into Aura’s backpack, then pulled it on over his chest, leaving his backpack behind.

“What are you doing?” Gladio asked.

“I can’t carry three backpacks, dude.”

“What about yours?”

He swallowed back a pain in his chest. “She has nobody and nothing. This is all she owns. I have a home back in Insomnia. It’s just stuff to me.”

“At least let me try to fit some of your stuff in these other bags.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Prompto said, standing and making his way to the doorway. “I’m leaving it.”

“You sure?”

Prompto nodded, carefully climbing back out into the corridor. He glanced upward out the opposite window. Part of him wanted to ignore the sight, but another part knew he had to capture the scene. He pulled his camera out of Aura’s bag and snapped several photos. A stony white bridge lifted up the majority of the train still on the track. Prompto had only remembered hearing two explosions, but several had impacted the train; one at the engine, one at the first dining car near the front, and another before the dining car where he and Aura had talked. From these points, fire flickered out billowy, black smoke against yellowing cumulus clouds of early evening. Way up ahead, the black silhouettes of Imperial airships blocked the tracks. He pocketed the camera back into the bag, and a sudden groan of metal froze him in place. When nothing happened, he released a gasp of air.

“We should go,” Gladio said for him.

“Yeah.”

They hurried as much as the obstacle course before them would allow. While they hurried, they looked for additional passengers. At the time of day, most would have been in the dining cars. He shuddered when he imagined the ones who did not burn were already down on the ground below.

When they finally did stumble upon a passenger, the encounter had been a tense one. The woman was frantic, and despite their best efforts to calm her and request her to come with them, she refused, rambling instead about the Imperials wanting Tenebrae now that they had Lucis. After several minutes of attempted coaxing, Gladio tugged on Prompto’s arm. Though Prompto didn’t want to abandon her, he knew the woman, still in the throes of shock, would not listen to reason. He silently followed Gladio and left her behind.

As they climbed through empty cars and around wreckage, Prompto’s hope faltered. Every passenger they encountered was either dead, or too stunned to move, but none of them were Aura. Every so often Gladio and he would pause to call out her name, but to no avail. A frightening thought ran through him as he imagined her lying unconscious somewhere, and they would pass her and never know it. He became terrified when he wondered if they already had. He began to call out her name more often, more panicked.

At the gangway connection between two of the sleeping cars, misery overcame him. Having no potion or elixir running through his body to combat his earlier fall and his skinned arms and backside, he stumbled on weakened legs and slumped against the corner next to a set of descending steps.

“Shit, bud, you okay?” Gladio stooped low and extended his hand to help him up.

“No, I’m not!” Prompto snapped. He knocked Gladio’s hand away. “I fucked up. I royally fucked up.”

“What on Eos are you talking about?” he said, throwing his arms out. “Fucked up how?”

“Aura, man. I fucked up with Aura. And now, she might be dead, and I can’t apologize to her or anything.” His throat crackled with oncoming tears, but he forced them away.

“Did you say something to her?”

“Yes!” Prompto dropped his forehead into the palm of his hand, pressing hard against the pressure inside it. “I pretty much shut her down. Just for talking to me. You should have seen her face, Glad. It’s like, I completely broke her. And she went to leave, and the train exploded, and I don’t know what happened to her.”

“What do you mean, shut her down? She come onto you?”

“N-no. Well…I don’t know. I told her she needed to continue looking for her husband.”

Gladio grunted. “Whoa. She told you about him?”

He nodded. “Back in Lucis. She said she didn’t know if he was dead or not. And I told her to keep looking for him, right after she told me how happy she was being around me.” He dropped his hand and let his head fall against the wall behind him. “I’m such a tool.”

“Prom, enough. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. She’s not dead. You can apologize to her later.” Gladio extended his hand again. “Now get up and help me find her.”

“But what if she is?” he asked, small.

“Prompto,” Gladio said as he crouched beside him. “You’ve seen her, since we first met her, survive what normal people cannot survive. You and I saw her practically gutted when she crawled back into Hammerhead, right?”

Prompto didn’t want to remember, but he nodded anyway.

“And you didn’t see it, when the three of us rescued you and her from Lestallum. Neither one of you should have survived, as Ignis told you. But there was something else I didn’t tell you about.” He paused and exhaled slowly.

“What? What didn’t you tell me?”

“When you had her hand in yours, and you begged me to take her with, I knew you were alive. Your heart was still beating. You were still breathing. But…” He paused again. “Prompto…she wasn’t.”

“I-I…I don’t understand.”

“She was dead, Prom. No heartbeat. No breathing. No anything. We took her only because you begged us.” 

A dark cold ran through his limbs. “W-what? What are you…she was…?”

Gladio rubbed at the corners of his tired eyes. “I thought, when I gave her a Phoenix Down in the back seat of the Regalia, I was wasting a curative. She was dead, after all, not knocked out. But when she started breathing again, none of us could believe it. And the moment she woke, she grabbed your hand again, and passed out.”

Prompto’s heart thudded against his aching breastbone. “She was dead,” he whispered, mostly to say it for himself.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “And then she healed, completely. In the course of maybe twelve hours. I don’t know what she is, or why she’s that way, but it’s not natural. I don’t think she’s a Messenger, but if it isn’t a direct blessing from the Astrals, then it’s something much darker.” He sighed. “So when I’m telling you, she’s alive, I’m telling you she’s alive. You have to believe me when I say it.”

Mutely, Prompto nodded.

“So are you going to help me find her, or not?”

“Of course,” he said weakly. He grabbed Gladio’s extended hand and lifted from the floor.

“All right. You have to apologize to her after all. Before this thing really does decide to collapse.”

As if to answer Gladio, a ricochet of gunfire on metal echoed in the distance high above them. The train groaned all around them in response. Out of habit, Prompto flicked his wrist, and felt a flood of relief when his Rebellion materialized into his palm. He flicked it away.

“At least we know he’s still okay,” he said.

“He has Specs with him,” Gladio answered. “I hope they just ran for it.”

“You know Noctis. Of course he didn’t.”

“I can hope. Stubborn brat.”

When they moved again, they moved with more haste. The gunfire on the bridge increased in frequency, resulting in the movement of the train around them. At first, it would shift only slightly underneath their tread. But as the minutes ticked by, it would shift an entire foot or two on the occasion.

As they moved, Prompto thought solely of Aura. He worried for her, despite what Gladio said, and worried often. When he found her, he was going to take back what he said. He would tell her how he felt about her. Even if she didn’t feel the same way about him, he was going to do everything in his power to bring the color back to her eyes and the smile back to her lips.

When he did think of her, he tried not to think of Gladio’s story of her. But he couldn’t help the thoughts springing through his head.

_She was dead._

It sprang through him again. And again.

_She was dead. She was dead._

_She’s not dead._

The remaining train cars sloped downward like a child’s slide toward the river and the remnants of the last car. Gladio descended into the next gangway connection and dropped onto the closed doors of the next car, sending vibrations through the whining metal. As Prompto prepared to jump in after him, he glanced out the open roof access in front of him to see the slope of the cars, and froze.

A tress of dark hair whipped in the wind.

His heart stopped completely. When it caught back up with him, he threw himself to the access.

Aura lay in a crumpled heap on the roof of the slanted car ahead, unmoving. Her hands lay upright and her face down, covered by the curtain of her hair. A puddle of darkened blood stained the metal beneath her head.

“Aura!” he cried out, his voice cracking in his throat.

She didn’t move, let alone respond.

“What is it? Do you see her?” Gladio asked.

“Yes! She’s on the roof of the next car. She’s not moving.” He inhaled and cried out her name again. When he received no response, he ripped Aura’s backpack off and threw it out of the access on the roof ahead. It thumped and slid until it stopped against her still body.

“For the Astral’s sake, don’t you dare be dead, Aura,” he growled as he shimmied through the small roof access and out into the open air. The wind whipped his hair around his forehead and into his eyes. He squinted against its bite and crawled carefully over the gangway connection’s roof toward her.

“I’m coming, Prom!” Gladio called from inside the car.

Prompto worked forward on hands and knees, struggling not to slip on the steep decline. They had one more car to traverse before they would reach the smoldering rear car near the river. Another fifty feet or so, but still a terrible distance to fall.

When he reached her, he gently grabbed her shoulder and pulled her over. He pushed the hair from her face. Some strands had dried and stuck to her forehead and cheeks. He couldn’t tell where the blood came from. He felt a pulse, albeit shallow, but couldn’t feel her breath on his fingers.

“Fuck, Aura, I’m so sorry,” Prompto whispered as he pulled her up into his arms. He gripped her hard and buried his face into her hair, ignoring the tang of blood wafting in it. “Please be okay. Please, please, be okay.”

The train groaned underneath him, dropping the car another foot toward the ground. Her backpack slid, and he grabbed it by one of the straps. He quickly slipped her arms through the straps and buckled it across her abdomen, then pulled her back in his arms as the train shifted again. They dropped several more feet toward the ground, and Prompto slid on his knees across the roof of the car. He readjusted and pressed his boots against the roof, searching for friction.

“Hang on, Prom!” Gladio called out behind him.

“Not anything to hold onto, man!”

In several seconds, Gladio slid to his hip beside Prompto and examined Aura for himself.

“I don’t know,” he muttered when he couldn’t feel her breath either. “We need to get her a Phoenix Down.”

“You have Noctis’ bag,” Prompto said with a nod at the bag on Gladio’s chest. “Check for one.”

Gladio ripped the zipper from Noctis’ bag and ransacked through the chaotic arrangement of clothes and sundries inside. “Damn. How does he keep anything organized?”

Prompto’s heart raced as he waited. He glanced down at Aura’s blanched face, wanting desperately to press his lips against her forehead and promise her she would pull through. The longer Gladio carried on, the stronger the urge became. Panic flowed like a river again when Gladio cursed.

“Fuck! Aside from potions, he has nothing in here!”

“Try Ignis’ then!” Prompto quickly adjusted so Gladio had access to the bag on his back. Gladio yanked at the zipper and dug through, jostling Prompto around. He was sure the organization differed greatly from Noctis’, and if a Phoenix Down existed, Gladio would easily find it.

Yet nothing fruitful seemed to yield as Gladio fumbled through Ignis’ belongings. He growled in frustration, digging faster through the bag. Prompto’s heart threatened to burst from his chest. He swore he could feel Aura’s body growing weaker, even though he knew there was no feasible way to know that in her unconscious state. It was something he simply felt inside his own bones, beneath his own skin. 

Without much more thought, he wrapped his other arm underneath the crook of her knees and pulled her to his chest to carry her. Then, he lifted his boots and slid as far as he could to the end of the roof. Behind him, Gladio caught up and followed. At the end of the car, in front of the blazing warped metal of the remaining train, Prompto jumped.

The fall from earlier had been accidental, and though he fell a greater distance the first time, this time hurt worse. His already beaten body crashed into the hull of a gangway connection, and a metal shard pierced the meat of his thigh. He recoiled and screamed. He yanked off of the shard, leaving his blood on its shining point, and examined Aura. The fall didn’t touch her. He forced himself to his feet, and slipping in the ash of the burnt earth, he stumbled out of the wreckage and followed the river upstream. A nest of savanna trees blending with thicker, greener trees caught his attention, and he beelined for it. In the long shadows, in a temporary haven, he dropped to his knees and pulled off both of their backpacks. Gladio tailed him. He dropped beside Prompto and resumed digging through all of the bags, cursing at his own clumsiness when he could not move fast enough.

While Gladio searched, Prompto drew Aura into him again, clutching her like she was the last drink of air in a drowning world. Like he felt on the roof of the train, the sensation of her diminishing life force radiated in his own senses again, as if he could practically hear and taste her death coming. He leaned down and pressed his forehead against her bloody one.

“Be okay,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “Be strong. Just a minute longer.”

As if the Astrals smote him with his own nightmares, a wave of nausea overcame him as old, tired feelings he long repressed rose up inside. He remembered the first ache of his heart, thirteen years ago, when his entire world had been ripped from him. He remembered a little girl’s tiny, broken body, bleeding in a sinister man’s arms, and all he could do was run and leave her behind. He remembered that feeling of despair, when he had failed another girl before. It returned to him fully in the moment, and Prompto couldn’t control his tears from spilling down his cheeks. They fell in Aura’s hair, down the side of her face, and ignoring his earlier restraint, he pressed a chaste kiss against her brow. He lingered for a moment, feeling the lack of warmth from her usual fiery skin, and his tears fell faster.

“I wish I could tell you why this hurts so much,” he whispered against her.

He held her tight, wanting the world to fall away for a moment while he recovered. Gladio slowed his digging through the backpacks, knowing now they owned nothing to save her. The train behind them shrieked under gunfire, yet Prompto didn’t care. He merely held, with all his heart, onto Aura’s cold body. He was sure he saw in his periphery the flash of blue from Noctis’ warp. He was sure someone else was talking. Rustling around in coat pockets and backpacks. But he ignored all of it. He closed his eyes, and saw in the darkness of his memories, a little blonde girl pressing her fingers to his lips to silence him.

His body numbed from the inside out. The only sound in the world became the thump of his own erratic, broken heartbeat. Ignis’ hand appeared on Prompto’s when he parted his heavy eyelids. He didn’t have to hear Ignis to know what he was saying.

_No one has a Phoenix Down._

Prompto pressed tighter into Aura’s hair, smearing her blood against his freckled cheek. Despite the unearthly affection he developed for a stranger—a mere hunter they encountered in their travels—he believed for a moment he would never feel happiness again. Even if she had felt nothing for him, he had felt something heavenly for her.

And when he believed all hope was lost, and his tears crystallized between the surfaces of their touching skins, he felt the smallest, slightest of movements. Aura’s hand shifted.

Prompto’s breathing stopped. Before he could pull back from her, her fingers gripped hard into the center of his shirt, and a warm exhale passed over the skin of his neck.

And for the second time, Prompto cried.


	13. Thirteen Years Ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was…a hard one to write. For multiple reasons. I spent two weeks on it. Apologies for you having to wait for it longer than usual.
> 
> As a reminder, Episode: Prompto is out now. I’m not going to play his DLC—or even watch the trailer—as I dive into backstory. So please don’t drop hints. I want to be as blind and deaf as possible.
> 
> To lighten the mood (if the mood can be lightened), I dropped a game reference in here. I’ve done it in a couple of the other chapters, too. Kudos to the one who can spot it.
> 
> Trigger warnings: child abuse/death, implied rape/non-con, blood/gore
> 
> Again, a hard one to write.

\- Thirteen Years Ago -

A quiet fell over the stilled group of a hundred male children. The technicians were increasing the frequency of their doses. They gave no explanation. When the technicians vacated the cafeteria, none of the other boys Prompto’s age moved, much less returned to their meals. Their fear radiated from their shaking bodies.

For Prompto, he had no fear anymore. It hurt, as it always had, but it didn’t hurt like he had been accustomed to since the birth of his first memories. The girl on the other side of the glass and he had found a way around the pain, and kept it theirs for several months now. They managed to gain strength every time they looked one another in the eye—something the technicians would never do. 

After the news, the other boys stared down at the congealed squares of protein mash that made up their daily sustenance. Prompto ate in silence, anticipating their upcoming dose, and the time he would be able to spend with the girl.

The others were capable of speech, as he was, but for many, they couldn’t formulate the words necessary to convey the terror they had for these days. They dreamed of nothing outside of the procedure, as the procedure and psychological evaluations were all they knew. Once they turned ten years of age, things would change. Life would become physical over mental. They would be trained as the teenagers were trained, before they would eventually receive their final two months of injections and be churned out like machines into the armory labs. None of the other boys really knew what happened in there. The sent teenagers never came back.

The technicians the children associated with through daily agenda were human—unlike them—and would often talk of the world outside. They figured it did no harm to the children, as their memories would erase once their procedures were completed. But along with speaking of the world outside, they also spoke of the children. Always in hushes, though. They knew the children would become monsters, and the spoken hushes revealed that perhaps, the technicians in some small way feared them. 

_MT_ , is all they would say. Never what it was, or why it happened. But the way the letters sounded in their mouths made the children know it was a thing to fear. MT. An abhorrent act against the Hexatheon. A technological gift from the Solheim Empire. A savior to the Aldercapt lineage. A scourge against all others.

Along with the male children, the laboratory also housed female children. They remained in a different part of the facility, monitored every hour of the day, and subjected to different procedures and mental evaluations. They reacted differently to the dosage, as the technicians often said to one another. However the females reacted, it required for them to endure frequent observation. The male technicians talked of the female children more than they spoke of the outside world, often with derision under their laughing breath and strange hand gestures Prompto didn’t quite understand. 

The laboratories also ‘lost’ more females than males, though the technicians never discussed how or why they were ‘lost’ in front of the male children. Every time Prompto heard of another lost girl, his chest would hurt in a way he never experienced any other time. Often times his increased heart rate would alert one of the technicians, who always wrote off his condition as anticipation of the procedure. He would proceed to worry until the next dose when he would see his friend’s face again for himself. And when he would affirm she hadn’t been one of the lost ones, relief would flood him and he would beg her to never get lost. She would always promise she wouldn’t.

A technician in the cafeteria ordered the male children to eat. Many didn’t want to resume, but reluctantly picked their forks up to portray obedience. Prompto finished his protein and sat quietly, awaiting his escort with nine other boys to the labs. Several moments later, when the others near him swallowed their food with pained faces, two technicians ordered them from the tables to the corridor. In the corridor, as they marched to their designated laboratory single file, a boy in front of Prompto began to cry. One of the technicians smacked him in the back of his blond head. At the resulting injury, the boy panicked, and pivoted to run back down the hall. Prompto didn’t dare to watch him go. A single _pop_ of a gun exploded, followed by a soft thump on the sterile floor. He muffled his own tears to keep them from spilling as he followed the other technician, who pretended as if nothing happened.

In a small room before the laboratory, the technician ordered each boy to strip from his plain white clothing. They were sanitized in one group in the scalding glass showers before sprayed down with alcohol. Prompto’s nose and eyes stung as the alcohol misted from his naked little body into his face. They redressed into single laboratory garbs as the alcohol self-dried them.

The laboratories in the facility—their entire world, as far as the children knew—radiated sterility with zero color and sharp, bright angles. Revolving white lights illuminated two metal tables on the center stage, surrounded by living, humming equipment. Though the tables served mainly for the purpose of the dosage, from time to time other necessary procedures would be performed on their surfaces. Sometimes standard examinations in the event of a substandard reaction. On the rare occasion, a euthanization and dissection. The dose itself—an inky, complex ichor too hypnotic to look at directly—churned within twenty small vials lined on a nearby glass counter.

Once inside, the technician indicated the middle glass chamber for Prompto—the only male chamber adjoining the female chambers. Sometimes he wondered if he would even be friends with the girl on the other side of the glass if she was a different girl. He wondered if she would be friends with a different boy. Or were they as special to one another as they liked to believe. The extent of his limited imagination remained at that.

He sat on the cold floor in the corner abutting hers, and waited. He was always last in line for the procedure, which resulted in more time to comfortably speak to her without the pain itching inside his veins. While he waited, he eyed the other boys. He imagined they all looked alike, but he had never seen his reflection before to validate it. Sometimes he could see the rim of his face in the glass in the right shadows, but the thought disappointed him so much he tried not to look too hard. The third chamber in line lay empty, yet in two beats, the second technician returned and ushered in a replacement boy to occupy it.

When the girls filed in, and he saw her familiar face at the back of the line, he warmed immediately. Her door hissed open, then hissed closed. When she placed her head against the glass next to Prompto’s face, she closed her eyes. She appeared more tired than usual.

“Did they tell you?”

Prompto nodded. “But it means we can see each other more.”

An unenthusiastic smile tugged at her lips.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“No, don’t do that.” He readjusted and pressed his hand against the glass, hoping for hers as well. “You have to tell me. We promised.”

“I don’t know how to tell you,” she said, shaking her head again.

“Here, like this.” He popped open his mouth and yammered silent words. “Easy. Just open your mouth, and words come out.”

Small joy replaced her earlier reluctance, and she chuckled to reveal her teeth.

“Wait, what’s that?” he asked, looking at her mouth.

“What?”

“That! You’re missing a tooth! Where’d it go?”

She pushed the tip of her tongue through a dark gap at the side of her teeth. “We started losing them a couple days ago. Almost all the girls are missing that one.”

“Is it normal?”

She widened her eyes with a half-shrug. “They say it is. So I think so.”

“It’s weird.”

“It’s really weird to eat now.”

“I wonder if me and other boys will lose one.”

“I think so. It will be the same tooth at the same time. That’s what they said.”

One of the technicians called out the number of another girl in the first chamber. Prompto saw movement out of the corner of his eye as they approached her, but he didn’t acknowledge the exchange. It overwhelmed him to watch the other children endure the procedure.

He instead giggled, thinking her mouth looked funny now a gap existed in the white. He stopped his laugh when her silence returned.

“I don’t feel good,” she whispered.

“Are you sick?” he asked, feeling a panic crest through him. “Don’t be sick! They’ll find out, and then you’ll be lost, and you promised you would never be lost.”

“I’m not sick. I don’t feel good.”

“Where?”

She poked one finger in the center of her chest, and gingerly, she pointed down between her legs.

“Why?”

Her bottom lip puffed out. “I can’t tell you.”

“You can tell me. You promised, and I promised. Last week, right?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“We’re best friends for the rest of our lives now,” he continued, dropping his voice low, “so you can tell me anything, and I can tell you everything.”

Her puffed out lip quivered. “Sometimes the technicians do things to us.”

“What things?”

She waited a long time before answering. “I don’t know what they do,” she whispered, “because I can’t see it. It hurts a lot.”

“They hurt you?” Heat riled through Prompto. “Why do they hurt you?”

“Because they like it,” she mumbled. “They laugh and say we won’t remember it anyway.”

“B-but they…they shouldn’t hurt you,” he stuttered, illness churning through his stomach. “That’s not okay.”

“I can’t stop them. But when I think about other things, like you, it doesn’t hurt so bad.” She met his gaze then. “Kinda like when we look at each other, and then this doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“But…” His own lips formed a frown. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”

With a small shake of her head, she pressed her hand on the glass against his.

The first girl returned back to her chamber, shaking from her procedure. Prompto didn’t look at her when she passed.

“How many times does it happen?” he continued, feeling hot in his face.

“Sometimes. A lot sometimes.”

“Every day?”

“No. It happens every day, but not to me every day.”

A pain shot through his chest and stomach, and he clutched tight the laboratory garb overtop his heart. She noticed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “My chest hurts when you tell me these things.”

“Don’t say that!” she ordered above a hush. “If they hear you say that, they’ll cut you apart up there.”

“I know. I won’t. It just feels funny. I don’t like it.”

“Okay. I won’t say anything else that makes you feel like that.”

“No!” he snapped. “No, you need to tell me! I want to know. We can’t keep secrets from each other, okay?”

With a frown, she nodded. “Okay. I have another secret to tell you.”

He inched closer to the glass. “What is it?”

“A funny man visited me while the other girls were sleeping.”

“Did he hurt you?” The callous voice coming out of Prompto’s mouth didn’t sound like his. “Like the technicians do?”

“No. He asked me weird questions. And he knows about us.”

The pain shot through Prompto’s chest again. He fought to clutch at his garb, knowing repeated actions would get him noticed. “What does that mean?”

“He knows you’re my—”

A crooked, angry scream cut her voice off. The fine hairs on Prompto’s arms bristled, and his veins ran cold.

In the first chamber, the first girl thrashed with seizure. She kicked her bare heels on the floor, screaming a guttural language that didn’t sound like any language Prompto knew. She hissed and spat, and pounded her fists into the floor beside her. One of the technicians walked over to her chamber, eyeing her seizure carefully but with little concern.

Before Prompto could reassure his friend, the first girl lifted to her toes and threw her shoulder into the door. A finely webbed crack appeared in the glass at the impact. Then she smashed her own head into the same spot. Blood speckled over the growing crack in the glass. Her eyes blazed vermilion in the wanness of her face.

She repeated this action of smashing her head into the glass door, over and over. The crack continued to spread, and her blood continued to spray, until finally the other technician pulled a screen up and danced his fingers across the panel. A glowing red sigil flashed on all four walls of her chamber, and instantly her energy disappeared as she slumped against the door. Her cheek slicked on the red of the glass, smearing a bloody stripe down to the ground. She was still alive, still breathing, but contained by the sigils around her. Her red eyes met no one’s as they rolled around in her head like marbles.

“Is that what happens to us?” Prompto asked quietly. “Is that a monster?”

His friend whipped around to look at him with a dropped jaw. “The boys don’t do this?”

“W-what are you talking about?”

Her eyes widened. “Because this happens to the girls.”

“I’ve never seen it.” He swallowed. “Does it happen a lot?”

“Every week,” she answered.

“Every _week_?”

Confusion flashed in her tensed facial features. “You’ve…never seen this happen before?”

He shook his head. “Is she…is she lost?”

A slow, deliberate nod.

The pain in his chest returned. “W-what if that happens to you? What if you become lost?”

“I won’t. It won’t happen to me.”

“How do you know?”

“The funny man told me.”

“The man who visited you?”

She nodded, and when he glanced up into her eyes, which were able to absorb every color in the room, he felt an ease pass through him. 

Until her eyes flashed vermilion.

His heart stopped. A cold, dead organ hanging by mere threads inside the cavity of his chest. A feeling he never felt before, and would never understand even if he felt it again. All the misery of the world’s woes poisoning his psyche. When he thought, even for the beat of a breath, she became lost, he died inside.

But the red did not stay solely in her eyes. It flashed everywhere. On her face, in the pale of her hair, on the glass, on the girl in the chamber beside her. Red lights flashing everywhere.

A shrill buzz filled the air in intervals, offset by a staccato code of words making little sense to Prompto.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

Prompto glanced around, and all the other children appeared just as confused as they were. But the technicians’ reactions stilled him. One flew to a cellular device and started muttering gibberish hurriedly into it, while the other…the other checked two assault rifles for full cartridges of bullets.

An explosion caused Prompto’s hair to stand on end, and when he whipped his head to see the cause, a livid, dark creature rushed the length of the laboratory. The first girl broke from her glass chamber with the failed red sigils. She tackled the technician on the emergency phone, crying gutturally.

She was what they feared they would eventually become: a monster. 

A _daemon_. 

She disconnected one of the technician’s arms from his torso with one yank with her clawed hands. His scream strangled when she knocked the bottom jaw off his face. The jaw flew and collided into the wall with a _thwack_.

“Don’t look!” Prompto screamed at his friend, who cowered in the corner of her chamber, wide-eyed. “Just close your eyes!”

She flicked her gaze to him before squeezing her eyes shut.

Prompto did the same, pressing into the corner against her as a hurricane of sounds wrecked them. Rapid gunfire sounded off, pinging off metal surfaces underneath the pealing sirens. The gored technician shrieked, while the remaining technician shouted panicked sounds not resembling words. Other children around them cried, their hands squealing vainly as they clawed at their glass prisons.

And then, it stopped.

Utter silence became the world as Prompto was sure he was either dead or deaf. He cracked his eyelids open. The girl on the other side did the same, and their eyes met. Despite the comfort they found within one another, their uncomfortable environment did little to allow that peace. Prompto broke away to look around.

Everything had froze.

The flashing lights ceased flashing as red stained the laboratory in permanence. The other children sat like dolls with porcelain faces, recoiling from the daemon. A tantrum of mangled violence captured mid-fury lay waste to the floor between the tables, and Prompto let his eyes drift past the scene. The remaining technician had an assault rifle raised at the daemon tearing apart his colleague, but he didn’t move, much less fire the weapon in his hand. Blood pinpricked the air like red stars hovering in a crimson galaxy.

“What’s going on?” the girl whispered, pushing her hair from her wet eyes.

“I-I don’t know,” Prompto mumbled. “Everything’s stopped moving.”

They stood together and walked over to their glass doors, pressing their hands against the glass as they examined every inch of the world. Nothing moved. Even the daemon girl’s hair froze mid-flight around her face as she remained stuck in her own nightmare.

“Why are we the only ones moving?” she asked before she blanched. “He said this would happen.”

“Who said?” Prompto asked.

“The man who visited me.”

Without warning, both Prompto’s and the girl’s glass doors hissed open.

Prompto stilled, his heart shaking inside his tiny chest. He glanced at her, and her eyes widened.

“He’s freeing us,” she whispered.

“W-what? He’s…he’s letting us go?”

Tentatively, the girl toed outside of her chamber. She took another step out, and another, before finally, she stood outside of her chamber unsupervised. Mimicking her, Prompto did the same. He stood outside the door, quivering. He stared at the red world, at the daemonic girl and the bloodbath, then at the other children, before pivoting back around to look at the girl.

She was a real girl, a real and tangible being in front of him now. Not a child on the other side of the glass. He wanted to know she was real, and warmth spread through him when he reached out his hand to her. Her eyes widened, then she met him halfway.

When their fingers touched, Prompto lost the ability to feel anything else on his body. Their skins were the same temperatures, same softness. Comfort enveloped him, and his heart calmed to a slow, steady rhythm. Holding her hand for the first time felt better than any imagined scenario he conjured while lying on the procedure table. They laced their fingers together, and their breaths synced. He felt, in that moment, strong and able and courageous. He felt he could accomplish anything having her by his side.

“We have to go,” she said, breaking him from his trance.

He nodded. “Did the man tell you how?”

“Yes. Follow me.”

She tugged on his hand over to the door enclosing them inside the laboratory. She approached the scanner beside the door, digitally frozen with an emergency message, and lifted her right wrist with the codeprint to it. The message dissolved, and the doors hissed open.

“How did you do that?” Prompto asked.

“We all can. When we become teenagers. The man said he would do something in the computers so I can do this right now.”

“He’s really letting us leave?”

She nodded. “But we don’t have long. There’s an outbreak.”

“An outbreak?” Prompto had never experienced an outbreak, but he heard often from the technicians how horrible it was.

“The Deathless, he called them. He let them out of their cells. They don’t listen to directions like the teenagers do. So we have to be careful to not run into one of them.”

“What happens if we do?”

She pinched her lips closed and didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled on his hand and led him out into the red corridor. Down the hall, two technicians stood frozen mid-step, startled expressions on their faces by the commotion coming from inside the laboratory.

“It’s this way,” she said, pulling him in the opposite direction.

Together, hand in hand, they ran. Within the stationary world, the slaps of their bare feet on the cold tiles didn’t echo. The sound of their labored breathing didn’t leave their mouths. Everything felt finite and enclosed, as if they moved within a small box through the halls.

The girl knew where to go. She turned this way, then that way, through a maze Prompto didn’t understand.

“How do you know where to go?” he panted.

“The signs,” she said, pointing at the walls. “To the elevator.”

Within minutes, they reached the elevator. It was a simply, glass contraption supported by steel cables, and looked to hold a maximum of six people. She scanned her wrist again to open it, just as the world collapsed back into real time.

The sirens returned, screeching their incoherent staccato words in between flashes of emergency red. They boarded the elevator. Colored buttons dotted the inside of the wall, and were all labeled with letters and numbers. The floor they had been on was marked L12. The numbers went to 25. She slammed the heel of her hand onto an unmarked black button near the bottom. Prompto’s stomach lurched when he felt the drop of the elevator as they descended.

“Are there 25 laboratories?” he wondered aloud.

She glanced at him before looking at the buttons. “I guess so.”

“There’s a lot of us, aren’t there?”

She didn’t answer.

After several minutes, they reached a floor darker than the sterile laboratory tones Prompto had been accustomed to his whole life. The air felt icier, as well.

“Where are we?” he asked when they stepped off the elevator.

“I guess we’ll find out,” she said, tugging his hand.

They ran down the dimly lit hall to a door at the far end. The emergency lights didn’t touch down here, nor did the abrasive sirens. All lay in silence. She scanned her wrist, and the doors opened to reveal another set of doors. She repeated the process, and the doors hissed open. Inside, a cavernous, dark room stretched high and wide, and it housed thousands of what appeared to be glass tanks. The only light in the room emitted from these tanks, casting ripples of watery light on the floor before them. Slowly, Prompto approached one of the tanks nearby. Inside a crystalline aquarium of blue, a young man floated in water. A small black contraption filled his mouth and led out of the aquarium to a monitoring system near him. Prompto felt illness churn through his stomach when he knew instantly who the young man was. Who all the young men in the room were.

“What are they?” the girl asked.

“They’re the teenagers,” he replied, swallowing hard. “The boys. The ones I become.”

“So…where’re the girls?”

They glanced around, seeing only the same face on every figure floating in the aquariums. Their blank, white eyes stared out ahead, arms at their side, unreceptive to the activity in front of them.

“I-I dunno. Another area?”

“I guess so.” She swiped a sticky blonde hair from her forehead. “You’re pretty.”

“I’m pretty?”

“This is you. You become this. And it’s pretty.”

He shrugged, feeling a tinge of embarrassment. “I wish I could see what you look like.”

“Me, too.”

She stood in front of one tank in particular, staring up at the teenager he would one day become. She slid her fingers across the blue glass. When he reached out and gently grabbed her dangling hand, she flinched. It was strange to be touched for both of them, but he liked the way it made him feel when their skin connected. Their skins were the same, not too warm, not too cool.

“Do you think we could be real adults out there?” she asked in a small voice. “And be best friends for real? Like normal people?”

“I want to. So I think so.”

She smiled, pointing at the figure in the water. “And this is what you’ll be like. As a real adult.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled wider, flashing the new gap in between her teeth. “I like that. I can’t wait.”

“Me neither.” He tugged at her hand. “We should go.”

After a second, she finally nodded. “Okay.”

Hand in hand, they sprinted the remaining aisles of bodies in tanks. Prompto tried to ignore them, yet couldn’t. He was going to become what they looked like someday. The blonde hair, and the freckles all over, and the straight nose, and the long limbs and torso, and the lean muscles. He wondered if his eyes would be white, or stay blue like the other boys his age. He wondered if her eyes would change color, too, or remain the same.

As he wondered this, and they passed by another aquarium, a dark shadow in the corners caught his attention. Before he could say a word of warning, two vermilion eyes flashed open and leapt toward the girl.

She couldn’t even cry out. A figure tackled her against a tank and split the glass, jumbling the body inside and causing the fissure to spit water.

Prompto didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even pause to consider a strategy before he acted. He leapt on top of the armored figure and wrapped his arms tight underneath its neck. He yanked with all the might his little body could muster, staggering the figure back into the opposite tank. Prompto thudded against the glass and felt his breath escape in a whoosh. His grip loosened slightly as he saw the girl crumpled on the floor at the foot of the tank.

“Run! Go!” he screamed at her.

She pushed herself up with shaking limbs and looked up through the sweep of her hair. A thin line of blood slid down from one nostril to her lip. She blinked, then launched herself at the contorted, thrashing thing in Prompto’s grip. Her added force knocked them back again, and the tank behind Prompto’s back erupted into water and glass firework. Shattered pieces rained across him when he collided into the tank’s body. He wrangled himself out from underneath the twitching creature, scraping his hands on glass particles. He was soaked, and the liquid tasted nothing like water. He spat it out before crawling to safety and spinning around.

The creature they tackled had speared itself on a glass point in the tank. It was human-like, but not human. A metal mask covered everything except the gaping maw of a mouth. It barked and clawed mechanically at the spear running through its torso, as if ready to dig itself out through its own flesh.

“Are you okay?” Prompto asked, regarding her.

She swiped the back of her wrist under her nose. Blood streaked in between the black bars of her codeprint. “Yeah. I think so.”

“How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You and me. We pushed it over.”

She looked up at him through wet lashes. “Maybe because we’re strong.”

“I thought only the monsters were strong.”

“They are.”

A tugging ache overwhelmed him when he took a shuddering breath. “So…are we monsters yet?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“But this is a monster, right?” He pointed at the struggling figure.

“I think it’s a Deathless.”

The Deathless screamed a hollow sound before sliding its claws around in a writhing mess. It bumped the leg of the body that had been housed inside the tank before the crash, and it writhed harder at the contact. Glass screeched underneath its hands as they slid across the floor of the tank.

The girl beside him shivered as the liquid dripped from her hair. He reached for her hand, and without even looking for it, she clasped their fingers and intertwined them.

“Let’s go before more come out and see us,” he said.

They ran for it. Noises shifted in the cavernous room all around them, some closer than others. At the end of the aisles, in a back corner, an air duct grate sat propped open. The man had told her it would be the exit, she explained. They squeezed inside, immediately stifled by the immense heat, and pulled the grate back up to hide their escape. They followed the narrow tunnels on hands and knees, crawling to safety, crawling to freedom, crawling to a new life and normalcy.

* * * * *

The door at the end of the maintenance room sat precariously open.

Prompto felt the rain for the first time in his life, snaking cool lines in his hair.

All the gray of the cold world hidden in her eyes.

The screams behind them sounded off, inhuman, daemonic.

The girl was yanked backward from Prompto’s grasp. When he spun around, a man smiled a cockeyed leer before twisting her face to the side.

“Well, well, my two darling specimens have graced me an audience. I knew the temptation could not be resisted.” The man’s lyrical voice had an unsettling eminence over the top of the pattering rain. Raindrops pelted his intricately designed coat and pearled off to the pavement under his boots. A wide brimmed hat sat atop his muted red mane.

Prompto stood in front of him, hands clutching the sides of his soaked, laboratory garb. His friend sobbed silently in the man’s constricting arms.

“Don’t hurt her,” Prompto choked out, reaching one shaking hand toward her. “Please.”

“Why do you think I’m going to hurt her?” the man asked slowly.

“Other people have hurt her.”

“Oh, my. You poor, poor, little ones. What a terrible thing to suffer.” Though the man lilted the words softly, they sounded insincere.

He said nothing in reply.

“I have been watching you specifically for a while now. You have been a social experiment for my own interests. I desired to see if our creations were capable of the same interactions with one another as humans were.” His leer stretched wider. “I am astonished to find they are not the same interactions. If anything, they might be a little more.”

Prompto’s fingers and toes tingled with numbness as a strange emotion flip-flopped in his belly.

“I want to know how much you like this girl,” the man continued.

“A lot,” he mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

“What is ‘a lot’ to you?”

“She’s my friend.”

The man’s lips popped open in an exaggerated look of surprise. “Oh, now I _know_ that’s not the word you’ve been using.”

“She’s my best friend.”

He chortled between his pearly teeth. “Naïvely put, and saccharine. But it’s still not what you’ve been calling each other.”

Prompto didn’t say anything to respond, instead looking at the girl in the man’s arms. Her widened, watery eyes returned the earlier hurt inside that Prompto didn’t understand.

“Let’s play a game,” the man drawled as he rose to his full height. A monster of a man, he oozed unseen darkness in his charming smile. “As a child, you like games, don’t you?”

Again, he didn’t respond.

“Ah, that’s right. You don’t know what a game is, do you?”

He gave one small shake of his head.

“It’s when two or more people compete. For fun. Sometimes, there’s a prize.” He drew out the last word as he slid one finger down the side of the girl’s cheek. “In our case, let’s make your ‘friend’ the prize. If you win the game, you and her are free to leave, and be normal people in the world.”

He nodded.

“Oh, my, you really don’t know how games work, do you? See, there has to be a loser, too.” A chuckle filled with the terrors of the night spilled from his mouth. “If you lose the game, both of you must return to your glass chambers, and agree to become what you call, _monsters_.”

“What if no one wins or loses?” he asked quietly.

He leered a final time. “That I will have to consider as the game progresses.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Cat and Mouse. You play the Cat. If you’re quick enough to catch the Mouse, which will be her, you’ll be quick enough to also escape.”

“Escape what?”

The man shifted one hip and shoulder ever so slightly to reveal what lay behind him. The Deathless stood against an unstable fence, ambling around one another in jittering, mechanical movements. Dozens of vermilion eyes glittered in the darkness of their featureless faces.

“What you call the ‘lost’, little one.”

Prompto’s heart hammered into his throat as he watched the cresting wave of the Deathless rise and fall against the bending fence. The man tightened his grasp on the girl, and stepped backward and disappeared into a thick of starry shadows. Prompto wheeled around, wiping the rain from his face, but saw no one. The murmur of laughter echoed inside his ears from all around him, at the moment the fence at the end of the road collapsed under the weight of the Deathless hoard.

The Deathless moved faster than he thought they would. All the rogue Deathless inside ambled back and forth down hallways, as if some part of them had been ingrained to perform a particular duty until bothered. These Deathless soldiers had no duties, and shuffled toward Prompto and the road he stood in with less obedience and more active, unadulterated violence.

He dropped behind the trunk of a parked vehicle, frantically breathing as he tried to figure out what to do.

The man told him it was a game, and the objective was to catch the Mouse.

His objective was to find the girl.

So he ran. He was fast, but the Deathless were faster. He darted between cars into the nearby dock yard housing industrial-sized crates. Their empty hulls served as hiding spots as he zig-zagged through the metal labyrinth deeper into the heart of the yard. The daemonic soldiers worked at cutting him off from certain paths, leaping from crate roofs behind him.

He needed to call out to her, but she had no name. So he inhaled and screamed out the only name he knew to call her. And immediately he was blessed with a response.

_“Ah, yes._ That’s _the word I knew you would use.”_

The man’s hypnotic voice surrounded Prompto. He slipped on the pavement and skinned his bare knee, but he scrambled to his feet and continued to run in spite of the searing pain through his leg. He called her the name again.

And she screamed.

Panic flooded him, and stars burned at the edges of his vision as it narrowed into a defined tunnel. He followed the tunnel toward the sound of her screaming, and the screaming changed into a sound sicker and more twisted. His bare feet slapped into a puddle as he skidded around a corner and dodged the furious swipe of one mechanical Deathless. He ran, turned one more corner, and stopped.

Terror filled him as the cry falling from Prompto’s lungs sounded unearthly. His throat burned and cracked as he screamed and screamed at the scene in front of him.

The Deathless were destroying the girl. Every inch of her. The only thing he recognized was her pale, freckled face, framed by a halo of matted, bloody hair.

He ran at them, despite the ringing of his ears and stars in his vision. He pummeled into one with a scream, punching and kicking wildly, before he caught the glimpse of something dead and rotting beneath his feet.

The Deathless were not destroying her.

They were destroying another one of _them_.

Its deceased, leathered face vacantly stared, the vermilion glow long gone, as if it had been dead for months already. The Deathless formally destroying it stumbled over the top of it, barely regarding the body as part of the environment at all.

It had been an illusion.

Prompto detangled from the Deathless he pummeled before it could register to attack, and ran again. The rain steadily gathered weight as it fell faster and harder, and soon he could see his own breath clouding in the air. He pushed his blond bangs from his eyes and gasped for breath before screaming for her again.

And she screamed again.

He scooped up a rusted metal shard from the pavement and ran toward the commotion, dodging another Deathless as it tried to flank him from the shadows. Its red eyes burned holes into Prompto’s soul as he flew past, its daemonic howls still ringing in his ear. He cut the edge off an empty hull and rounded it.

The scene before him looked and felt so incredibly real. 

The girl, drenched in rain, saw Prompto and ran toward him with her arms outstretched, crying the name she called him.

And then her head disappeared from her body, dislodged by the wild sweep of a daemonic arm.

Before Prompto could scream, her body was swallowed by the shadows, and all he saw instead was the imprint she left on the air around her. He blinked as he tried to still the palpitations under his breast.

A game of illusions.

Catch the Mouse.

Prompto had to find the _real_ girl.

He gripped the metal plank until it cut him in the palm of his hand, and threw himself at the Deathless who decapitated the illusion. He stabbed weakly in every soft spot he could, crying before shoving with all the strength he had in his tiny body. The Deathless staggered noticeably, but did not fall. Enough of a space for Prompto to escape. He bolted into the empty hull, temporarily sheltered from the overwhelming rain. Its pinged echo on the roof sounded like bells. And he hated it.

He shivered, ignoring the pain in his bleeding knee from his fall, as he exited the hull on the other side. The rain no longer smelled earthy, but tarry and stringent as the water gathered the smells from the pavement and the metal yard. It turned his nose. He could taste the salt of his hair as the rain dripped to his mouth. He tried earnestly to wipe his face. The sodden garb did little to warm or dry him as it clung heavily to his frame.

Licking his lips, he screamed for her a third time.

As he knew she would, she responded with a scream of her own.

The scene was not as gory as the last two, but it still hurt Prompto to even see it happen. After judging for himself it could not be real, he ran away and tried again. And again. Always yelling for her, always a scream in response.

When he didn’t believe he could handle another scene, to watch his best friend die in front of him by the monsters they would become, he screamed for someone else.

“Where is she?” he yelled out. “Give her back to me!”

The answering cackle tsked at him. _“You’re simply not fast enough.”_

“Yes, I am!” he shouted. “I run to her, but it’s not her. You’re just tricking me.”

_“Ah, but who said I implied anything about physical speed?”_

Prompto blinked hard.

_“A cleverer specimen would have figured this out. I’ll give you one more chance before the game is done.”_

She screamed again.

Tears wracked his body as he felt unable to understand anything. He didn’t know what else to do, so he began to run. He stumbled over his own two feet when he heard the howls of a nearby Deathless, and he landed hard on his hands and knees into a puddle. His already skinned knee sung with starry pain. He scrambled back up and hobbled toward her scream. 

But halfway through his hobble, Prompto stopped. None of this made sense. He didn’t understand why he would constantly be beckoned by her pains of suffering to only see her die. He took a couple steps backward. Was it even her scream he heard?

And then he turned around.

Behind him, a haven within a streetlamp he had not seen nor come from beckoned him with its sunshining aura. 

A light in the darkness.

And she stood within it.

He knew it wasn’t an illusion when he looked into her eyes. The fabricated versions of her eyes didn’t reach into the corners of his soul like the real ones did. Despite the terror written all over her face, her eyes gave him comfort, after all the time they spent looking at one another during the procedure. He knew she was real.

He hesitated a moment too long.

Behind him, a Deathless growled and side-swiped him, knocking him into the side of a hull. The resulting echo rang across the yard as he hit. His body felt broken, as the only pain he ever experienced in his life was the pain the procedure brought. He screamed as he tried to scramble away. He hobbled toward her as the Deathless approached, bracing one arm against his right ribcage.

Ahead, another figure shifted in the light.

Suddenly, all pain in Prompto’s body was gone. He gripped the metal plank in his hand and took off at a run. The sting in his skinned knee and his broken bones all melted away when he saw the man in the strange clothes approach the girl from behind.

He screamed for her.

The man scooped her up from behind languidly, as if he enjoyed taking his time while Prompto ran out the capacity of his lungs. He cradled her and twisted her neck to the side while she writhed and kicked.

Prompto screamed for her again, running at his full speed but getting no closer.

The man clamped his large hand across her mouth and whipped out a small, silver shiv from within his engulfing sleeve.

He was so close. A few more steps.

The shiv slid slow underneath her jawline straight upward. She squirmed and screamed in her throat. All the while, the man watched Prompto until the shiv stopped against the hilt of his hand.

Prompto slowed as he watched her kick rhythmically until she stilled in the man’s arms. When he reached the edge of the haven, he didn’t dare step over into the light.

He held his breath, waiting for the curtain to be thrown and the illusion to be revealed.

He waited.

But the scene didn’t dissolve. Her body didn’t transform into a Deathless corpse. Her body remained her body, her blood remained her blood. And in the moment, Prompto could feel his heart blackening over like a charred piece of rubble. The metal plank fell from his hand with a clatter to the pavement.

“Is this real?” he whispered underneath the sting of hot tears.

“Dear little one, not a thing here isn’t,” the man said as he pressed the girl’s body into the cradle of his shoulder like a newborn infant. “The game ends with no winners or losers.”

“W-Why…why…did you…” But he couldn’t form the words necessary to convey the tumultuous thoughts running through his head. 

He had been so close. So terribly close.

“Oh, my. If only you had been a little faster,” the man drawled with sympathetic undertones. 

Her broken body lay limp in the monster’s arms. Her head lolled back over his elbow, staring sightlessly up at the heavens. Its rains washed the single pierce underneath her neck of its blood.

“B-but…I-I…I was…I was her…” He swallowed back the hardness building in his throat. “I don’t have…anyone now…”

“Life is unfair, yet fate is often worse. But you were never born within fate’s harnesses, so if anything, I was merciful to what the world out there would have done to her. And the Astrals would have never heard your pleas.”

A sob churned up in Prompto’s chest, but he didn’t let it out.

“You and her were nothing to one another but a calculated deception on my behalf,” he continued, emanating profound pride. “I wish all of the specimens contained the connections you two did, but a little less of the quixotic. I couldn’t exude the patience for an army becoming misty-eyed for each fallen comrade. I suppose, while I clean the mess out here and return the Keep back to full function, I should store her in the freezers for a later dissection. To see what may have been missed.”

Prompto’s sob bubbled out as he unwillingly imagined what the man told him.

The charming smile, oozing darkness from the corners, became a smile worse than any scowl on any daemonic face. “Now, you had better scurry from here…before I change my mind and begin the game anew.”

The world became a bleary-stained confusion as Prompto’s bare feet carried him down the road into a strangely abandoned city. He didn’t even remember leaving. The howls of terrible things lurking in the dark forced him to run, even though the image of his friend hanging in the man’s arms tried often to slow him down. He couldn’t abandon her, but he did. She was dead, because he couldn’t save her. He wasn’t fast enough. Even at his hardest, he couldn’t be fast enough.

The only person he ever cared about in his tiny, tiny world was gone.

* * * * *

The border to the great Crown City of Insomnia lay ahead. Its stony structure looked plain compared to the detailed pamphlets of what lay inside. Prompto’s only chance of normalcy.

He was eight now. An eight that may have been closer to adulthood than childhood. He crouched against a flat stone at the edge of the road, gathering his wits before he approached.

All interactions he had with other people outside the laboratories were nearly non-existent. He feared them to a certain extent, after everything he witnessed traversing the empire in ruins at Gralea. He came to learn of the place he lived the first seven years of his life through information gathering. Prompto took many months to leave the terrible, forgotten city. He took another several months to leave Niflheim, as he struggled to separate himself as far away as he possibly could from it. When he learned of a great city called Insomnia in the country Lucis, he knew it would be a place he could pretend to be normal and blend in with the rest of the population.

He scratched the back of his wrist, knowing now the codeprint he had his whole life was a symbol of the terrors inside Zegnautus Keep. A dirty sweatband he had found buried in the dirt in Duscae now served as a cover for it. He adjusted the ugly thing to completely hide the codeprint, and even peered under the edges to assure the mark could not be seen even if the band slipped. Then he left his backpack behind with the concoctions of a sad story to gain access inside.

His parents were killed by daemons, the story went. He pulled up his tears, pointing out at the road behind him. Hours passed while the border officers searched for his imaginary parents, and they comforted him in one of the stations. Simple farmers, he told them. No siblings, no extended relatives. He was alone.

They asked him his name. And he told them, after having a full year to come up with one.

“Prompto Argentum.”

Because he wasn’t quick enough.

After nearly twelve hours, when nightfall finally arrived, and after assuring no one waited for Prompto outside in the Lucis outskirts, one officer brought him by car into the city. He wanted to believe Insomnia was big and beautiful, but what he saw was a living version of Gralea. All skyscraping architecture glittered with lights. Not a green thing existed anywhere.

The orphanage housed him for several months before two researchers filed the adoption papers. He was fortunate it happened quick. His parents were kind, and well put together, but lacked the affection he desperately craved. He figured he couldn’t be choosy. So he feigned his happiness, and learned to smile even when he wanted to cry.

Prompto buried his sorrows in food instead. Food was accessible and easy, given the amount of gil his parents earned in salary. But often he was left to his own devices, and with no governor to restrain him, he ate his way into physical depression. Photography came second, distracting himself from his own fat face while he snapped photos of others.

Until he met Noctis, Prompto believed he would never find anyone to care about again. They clicked effortlessly, and the world looked a little less gray with him in it. Their friendship allowed everything to fall into place. His weight loss. High school. Hanging out at the arcade. The Crownsguard. Ignis and Gladiolus. Eventually Prompto found himself able to date, and he dated often with any girl willing to give him a second glance. Though he tried to avoid them, he couldn’t help his attraction to blondes. He stayed in the relationship cycle, shuffling from one to another to another, because it was easy to forget the little girl’s face when another replaced her. He began to block everything before Insomnia out. He began to forget. He chose to forget.

His nightmares kept him from completely blacking out the first eight years of his life. The madness from them permeated his sleep all too often, until visits to a psychiatrist allowed him the sleep aid he needed to get through the terrors. It was written in his file as a traumatized past from the death of his parents. He agreed. He couldn’t tell them the real reasons.

Sometimes, though, when Prompto overmedicated on the sleeping pills, he began to hallucinate his dreams outside the realm of sleep. Sometimes the hallucinations tore him apart, as he relived that last night on repeat and slow motion. But sometimes, it was the other way around, and he only remembered the wonderful parts. On cool nights, when the window lay open and the breeze traced across his fevered brow, he could feel her hand in his again. Her heartbeat fluttered against his in tandem when he pushed her flaxen hair from her face. He could hear her giggle again when he pressed his hand against the glass window, seeing her face on the other side.

Sometimes, on profoundly lucid nights, she would talk. Sometimes, he could hear her say his name. However, the name she said was never ‘Prompto’, nor was it the name they used for one another. It was a different name, but he knew it was his.

“Why do you call me that?” he mumbled to the darkened bedroom.

She would smile.

And he would sleep.


End file.
